NR2003 Freezing Screen Help?

I have been experiencing this problem every time that I've tried to use NR2003 on my laptop for about the past day. I will open the game, it will appear to load, but the instant that the main menu screen appears, the game will freeze. The mouse still responds, but the cursor is the same as my laptop's, and not the one that should display in the game. The only way that I can exit the game is to ctrl-alt-delete and hit "End Task".

I do remember what I was doing right before this problem arose. I had been driving in an offline race session, and I somehow left the game and went online to download some new tracks. I never leave NR2003 running while I use another program and always exit the game when I need to, but somehow I left the game and went online while driving in a race session, and I have absolutely no memory as to how or why I did so. After I had downloaded the tracks and was ready to return to the game, I was surprised to find that I had left it running, but it still worked properly when I reopened it. I checked to see if the new tracks were in-game and they weren't, so I exited NR2003 and reopened it. As soon as it reached the main screen, it froze, and has done so every time that I've tried to open it since.

I'm not sure if what I did has any significance to why the game isn't working, but I can't find anything online explaining that this problem has arisen before or how to fix it. Would anyone be able to provide me with any help as to what is wrong and to what I can do?

(EDIT: Apologies for changing my mind so much, but the problem has arisen again, and this time changing the mod has done nothing to help as it did before. I only deleted some of my new tracks that I didn't want to keep, and now it is freezing upon being opened again.)

Apologies for the double post, but when I arrange the contents of my "NASCAR Racing 2003 Season folder" by the most recently modified, it shows that both the app and the core .ini files were updated at the same time that I've been experiencing these freezing problems.

My general knowledge on software and how it works is very limited, so I do not know if that has significant in causing the game to freeze or not.