An internal error occurred while running the Google Chrome browser

i have a Azure DevOps pipeline that completed successfully on one of my VM's yesterday. The testcomplete on my workstation and the testexecute on the VM are both 15.70 (latest release) installed a couple of weeks ago. Today, that same pipeline cannot even complete one test case successfully. it starts chrome but never navigates to the website. the error message in the devops log is simply

An internal error occurred while running the Google Chrome browser

Note: I can successfully run the testcomplete project suite on the exact same VM/testexecute via network suite. it just gets this error when it runs the pipeline. 

anybody know what's going on here?