For anyone who comes across this in the future, my solution requires me to set the OpenVPN service to automatic in services.msc. After doing so, the OpenVPN service attempts to connect to any configuration in the folder specified by the affiliated registry entry, and it does not need the use of the GUI. Adding "auth-user-pass passwordfile.txt" to the configuration, and creating passwordfile.txt with the user name on the first line and password on the second line allows it to connect. This can be a security vulnerability if you do not restrict what the VPN clients are allowed to access and is not suggested for most applications of VPN.
I haven't tried it, but I'm fairly sure the GUI won't work after setting the service to automatic. It doesn't bother me much, and it just means we will have to use IPsec on the computers which need a VPN connection to access our internal network.