Router Becomes Unreachable Due to OpenVPN Client?

[Enverex]

So I've been using Opnsense for a while now and everything's been great until about 3 weeks ago.

One morning about 3 weeks ago I went to use my work laptop and noticed no internet connection, couldn't even ping the router. Powered it off, then back on, everything was fine.

Then the same thing happened again a week later. Mildly concerned at that point.

Then it happened again Monday and now again today. But here's the interesting part - I assumed it had died overnight and I was only noticing when I got up, but this wasn't the case. Turns out the router was fine until I powered up my laptop and tried to connect over OpenVPN to my office. That's what was killing it.

For some reason, the laptop trying to connect to a remote OpenVPN server is killing the router. The router doesn't even ping when this happens and I have to hard reset it. And again this only started happening about 3 weeks ago, everything had been fine prior to then (while using OpenVPN still).

Router is using Realtek NICs (dual RTL8125 2.5GbE with the extra kernel module package plugin installed) and I have all 3 hardware offloading options disabled and hardware VLAN filtering disabled.

Anyone heard any other reports of this happening? I've searched around a bit and can't find anyone else describing the same problem. Any help would be appreciated.