Do not enable root. That's an open door to hackers, quite literally. It also won't help.
I doubt this will work, but you could try creating a new test user account. Login to that and see if you get the same problem. Most likely, you will since the kernel extensions are global and will affect any account.
Reinstalling the OS does not mean erasing the drive and starting over. You'd have to first erase the drive with Disk Utility while in Recovery mode, and then reinstall the OS on a blank drive. If you only reinstall the OS, it replaces all OS files with fresh copies. All user apps, files and settings remain the way they are.
But, we're talking about computers, and not everything always happens exactly as it should. Which is why you make a full, restorable backup first before reinstalling the OS.
Personally, I much prefer a bootable clone over Time Machine. Though TM definitely has some advantages. Like being able to go back through as many versions of an important document as exist on the TM drive to find a particular iteration. Many people do both. A TM drive for just that type of situation, and a bootable clone for a much faster restoration of an erased, or dead drive.
The two most popular utilities for bootable clones are SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. The free version of SD! always erases the target drive and then clones the source. So it can take a while to do. The paid version only has to do the full copy the first time, and then can make incremental changes by only removing, updating or copying items on the clone to match the source. CCC does the same thing. Full copy the first time (since nothing exists on the target drive/partition yet), and then incremental changes to match the source drive afterwards.
With either one, you set aside either an entire drive, or just a partition large enough to hold the contents of your main drive (plus at least 10 GB of free space). Format the target drive as you would any Mac drive with a GUID partition map and the partitions as Mac OS Extended. When you clone the drive, test that you can indeed boot to the clone.
Now, with a clone safely tucked away, boot back to your main drive, dismount and turn the external drive off. Boot into Recovery mode and reinstall the OS. If anything happens to botch the reinstall so badly the Mac won't restart to that drive, you can now boot to your clone and clone it back, putting your right back where you were without having to reinstall everything from scratch.
