deep-learningLearner:

so the issue seems to be not in CUDA installment itself, but how that is used by Pytorch.


Given that the initial setup was working, I also wouldn’t blame PyTorch but would guess that reinstalling the drivers has broken the shipped CUDA runtime.
Try to create a new virtual environment and reinstall the wheels there. If that doesn’t help, try to reinstall your initial setup.
EDIT: in case you haven’t done it yet, restart the laptop first and see if some dangling libs are still loaded and let me know how it goes.