When nobody on this forum seems to have a good grasp of OBS issues, with a just keep trying until you loose your mind attitude, the next best thing is to quit banging ones head against the wall and try something different.
Everyone here helping is a volunteer. There are varying skill levels in that body, so the responses received will vary. Additionally, as everyone is a volunteer, people have their lives to attend to... your question might be posted at a point where no one with a deep knowledge of OBS is around, and be buried by the time they are.
Additionally, obs-virtualcam is a plugin, not base OBS, so the knowledge-pool for it is significantly smaller, especially for weird/esoteric issues and problem presentations... in many cases, only the plugin author themselves will be able to help at first.
I tried for weeks, actually like a month, trying to get OBS to work with nothing but failures, and in fact it caused my computer to completely lock up with the black screen of death (thus the reason for the reimaging)
There is no way that uninstalling/reinstalling OBS and the obs-virtualcam plugin through the Windows Add/Remove Programs dialog on its own would cause a blackscreen system failure. One of your attempted fixes caused this. Not OBS.
I'd really like to try to get OBS up and running, but I am really afraid of the time loss and computer failure happening again, and perhaps even worse the next time. If anyone has additional information for me, to coax me back to OBS, I am listening. Thank you to all that did try to help me, I sincerely appreciate it! After all, I recently purchased a copy of Vegas Pro 17 and it would be nice to have some quality recording software.
No worries, man! Have a good one. OBS isn't a company. There are no employees, no metrics to meet, and so no need to try to 'win' users. If you do feel like giving it another go, I'd recommend starting at the obs-virtualcam plugin page, in the Discussion section:
MOD EDIT: This version of the plugin is currently deprecated and should not be used with OBS Studio v25. Please use this version instead: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.949/ We on the OBS team thank CatxFish for their hard...
obsproject.com
Hopefully catxfish will pop back in and give an update since it's been a good six months or so... but again, they're a volunteer. Could just as easily walk away and never touch the plugin again, if they felt like it.
(edit) That said, also, PLEASE post a logfile of a recording session at least 30 seconds in length, any time you have a problem. Even if it's just of a blank scene. We'll be able to look at the diagnostics and be able to tell things like if the VirtualCam DLL was found on startup and there were issues with instantiating it, or if it was not found at all (installed to the wrong place), and be able to help far more effectively.