I was never able to solve the problem. I had the company hardware people replace my computer with a new one and I was able to install VS2022 and the bug was gone. A few days later, after a security update to her computer, a third co-worker got the bug. She had the inspiration at one point to go over the ZScaler logs on her computer and found that VS was trying to communicate with the internet in a way that ZScaler blocked. I don't have the dirty details, but it seems the problem is a security issue.