Its really difficult to know what exactly is going on for the record I have not had this error but with this update animations don't work for me on W7 pro 64bit. Otherwise all other functions work. I use the esc key often and I doubt it is the cause of this. I am not sure of your computer skilz level but I would bet your registry is getting corrupted from some process on your machine possible a paranoid anti malware or anti virus app? you can try setting exceptions for Taffy tales in any of those kind of apps. My best advice and this does suck is to if you have not already tried this to delete the game including the registry data for taffy tales only (this is where if you don't know what you are doing you can brick your machine so unless you are familiar with Regedit don't mess around here) then download a fresh copy of the game and open the game. If you don't know how to use regedit then delete the game find a cleaner that looks at untied registry info it may be possible to clean un-needed registry info with a third party app.
I will recommend visiting the discord channel of the Dev and seeing if they have a work around for this I do believe you are the second or third person here that has had this issue. They might be aware of it and they might have a solution at least you may find out if it is even on their radar.
Also the Dev team with exception of the writer has not interacted with this thread for quite some time so just posting here may not get your issue noticed with them.
