Comp Goes Black After .aep Import

 I've exhausted all other resources so hopefully someone has experienced this issue:

AFX 25.2

Apple M2 Max/64GB/Sequoia 15.4

After encountering this in my previous project I started over. All was going fine for a few days but it unexpectedly started up again.

Comp window goes black and won't playback anything after importing any .aep no matter how simple. Flickers while scrubbing but will not play any audio or video in neither comp or layer windows. It also occurs when I use one of the FlashFX transitions, but usually on the second attempt. The first attempt is sometimes successful. In my previous comp try, I thought I solved it by deleting some Rotobrush comps which worked temporarily but it came back again a couple of days later. Footage is on Thunderbay RAID, project files and cache on external SSD. 

What I have tried:

Clear, Purge all cache

Reboot

Reinstall

Uncheck Hardware Acceleration 

Uncheck multi-frame render

Reset Prefs

Disable plugins

Start in Safe Mode

Turned off GPU acceleration 

Any other suggestions? 

Thank you