That anonymous callback thing is unsecapp.exe. I never noticed that running before so I turned it off like you said and jusched.exe too even though that's always running despite my protests
Loader still wasn't working.... so I restarted the machine just to be sure and guess what, it works.
Now I don't know exactly why or how it started working again but everything seems hunky-dory now. Those programs you mentioned are all back and running again like a bad smell that won't go away, which Windows is full of I'm sure. But thanks for the suggestion, Kannli, I tried it out and now it works, credit where credit's due.