I have not used Windows in years so this is pure guesswork but it looks like you have a systems-level problem and probably need to search the windows fora.
Does it seem to be RStudio or R*which invokes MS Publisher?
I am not sure from your post if you can load R from the desktop icon or from a terminal. If you can load R then aggressively purging and reinstalling Rstudio might work.
When you say
does that mean that you should not have it at all on your machine?
Sorry, I do not understand this.
You do not need RStudio to run R. It is very nice but but you might want to substitute another editor/IDE until you can sort out this problem.
Here is a slightly out of date listing of some editors/IDE's that you can use https://www.dunebook.com/best-r-programming-ide/. Years ago be for heading to Linux I was very fond of Tin-R. For real masocists there is ESS 
Sorry not to be of more help.