Alien Respawn Premium always errors, never backs up 15" laptop

Hey! It's really hard to find a support link related to Alien Respawn ( version 1.7.5.60) , hopefully someone still reads this forum. Anyway, I'm on a 2015 15" Alienware laptop (ALIENWARE15) running Windows 8.1 .

When I run a manual System Backup from the Backup window, it passes "Checking System" but when it gets to the "Backing Up" stage, the blue circular progress arrow spins forever, the Time Elapsed bar never progresses beyond 0%. I always have to force quit it as there's n evidence it's working.

It always tells me to Merge my backups so I say OK and it gives me an error that there's nothing to merge. Then it goes to a merge progress bar and that does the same thing, shows a timer and a progress bar that never goes beyond 0%.

I'm backing up to an external USB drive that has TB of extra space and I know it works because I use it for other things.

When I go to open Help, it opens a notepad full of code, like this;

http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">  etc etc

So that's kinda useless too. And Activity Logs is always grayed out so I cant tell if anything's happening.

Feeling pretty ripped off paying for this - how do I get it to work? Or what's the email for direct Alien Respawn support?

Thanks!

Jon A