Resolved, and leaving this up here incase other people need the help.
see image:
in an effort to try and adjust DPI on an external monitor, I went and changed the high DPI settings, not only did it not help my external screen blurriness, it also made revit crash during the window/tabs issues that I mentioned above.
I checked those boxes circled in red which caused the issues. Leave them unchecked.
Answer: don't adjust these settings. Keep them set to the default.