Pi 2 won't boot without touchscreen connected

Question

Timeline of events:

1. Installed a stable version of Raspbian, all systems work no real testing with the GPIO but HDMI and SSH work.
2. Tested various GPIO pins for running fans and several pieces of hardware, no issues since last version.
3. Installed touchscreens drivers from here. After this everything works fine, booting works without HDMI, with HDMI, or with the touchscreen. However, Touchscreen always defaults to even if HDMI is connected.
4. Attempted to address the issue that the Pi always defaults to the touchscreen, but no luck. To the best of my knowledge the same functionality from the above section was all retained, and no issues appeared.
5. I came back to working on the device one or two months later, but now the device will not boot without the touchscreen. It appears it hangs waiting for a touchscreen to get connected.

Steps attempted to fix the issue:

1. Multiple HDMI cables tested, (no difference).
2. Multiple power cords tested, (voltage issues on some but all work with the touchscreen).

Answer 1

First, try to do a clean install with this image -- the image provided by the company that manufactured the touchscreen, preloaded with the driver you need. Use Etcher, and follow the steps here, using the image above. Don't forget to "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade."

If that fails,

1. Do a clean install of Raspbian (if you don't have any important files you want to keep, just use the same microSD card, otherwise get another)
2. Hook the pi up to a monitor, and directly do the below without SSHing in:
3. Upgrade and Update packages
4. Install touchscreen driver

Possible problems could be that you have not connected a SPI interface (required per the driver's Github page), if you have a rpi3b+ you may have problems if you downloaded the driver version prior to v4.14, or that either certain package dependencies required by the driver are out of date, or the system is.