after effects lagging/hanging and getting stuck on a single frame

I'm not a tech whiz or AE knowledge whiz by any means, so if any of this is phrased poorly I apologise.

I recently upgraded AE to 23.4, the most recent release. I updated not necessarily because it was the most recent but because I was enountering an issue in 23.3 where my footage would get stuck on a single frame in the composition panel, even after dragging the timeline indicator away from the frame it was stuck on. It would just get stuck on that frame indefinitely, and if I entered a different pre-comp whilst its stuck and used the timeline indicator there it would flicker from black to having the whole composition box itself disappear. Then, if I tried to ctrl+s (for fear of an oncoming crash), the entire application freezes on the '0% saved' screen and says 'not responding' for 20-30 seconds, saves and then resumes like normal. A few adjustments later, the cycle repeats.

I updated to 23.4 with the hopes of fixing this issue but to no avail, its still persistant and is so frustrating that it actually makes me want to switch to a different editing program. I should also mention I did not notice this problem in any version of 22 or 2021 (that I can remember.)

I have:

- Updated all of my drivers, NVIDIA and Intel

- Re-installed After Effects

- Deleted and upgraded all of my plugins to be the most recent (BorisFX Sapphire, Trapcode and Red Giant.)

- Purged all of my preferences, cache, etc

- Removed all third party scripts

I don't know what else to do, so any guidance would be greatly appreciated.

These are my computer specs:

MSI Stealth 15M A11UEK

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU

11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-11375H @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz

Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.7 GB usable)
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Windows 11 Home

I also have 13GB of the 16GB RAM dedicated to After Effects under preferences (the max it will let me), and my disk cache is on an external hard drive with 700GB free space (though I know this isn't the issue because I had the issue before moving it to an EHD.)

Thank you!