I managed to build vtk with the line uncommented as suggested. This seemed to fix the issue of the initial black window but has not changed the behaviours I described which are the main problem for me as I cannot reliably extract the data I need.
Perhaps there are other files in which similar lines would need to be uncommented for it to work as expected although this seems like a very time consuming way to try to fix the issue with no guarantee of a it working. Perhaps there is a more global setting somewhere. Unfortunately, at the moment I don’t have the time to try to find it (if it exists) and will stick with using the computer on which it seems to work for now.
With regards to the black window fix though. Someone more competant should confirm this as it was the first time I have built a program and I barely had any idea what I was doing.