So for a more full story here: my host upgraded the PHP and as a result, the very old version of IPS that I had and was fine with for the time being was no longer compatible and it messed up the forum badly. I was running on version 3 of Invision since my former forum co-owner and I upgraded years ago. As I touched on earlier, she had disappeared with all the information needed to renew the license and upgrade to 4 and beyond, so I'm now stuck in a situation where to upgrade and make things functional again, I have to buy it all myself. So yeah, overall this is an absolutely must upgrade situation.
As for your second point, I'm not able to access the admin panel at the point I'm at, so I don't think I can remove it as an application. The reason we had commerce the first go around was because at that point we raised the funds for the forum, so we figured might as well get everything. But it did turn out that that wasn't needed, which is why I didn't purchase it again this time around.
I've had a support ticket with IPS for days now and still no response, so unless you don't recommend I purchase Commerce/Nexus (honestly, if I'm spending money on it, I'll make sure to use it this go around since I'm not a teenager acting on impulse like I was when I started this forum lol), maybe I should go ahead with it just to finish the upgrade? Or should I really just wait for IPS no matter how long they're primed to take?