Stuttering and non-existent audio playback in previews

All drivers are up to date, and there are no extraneous devices. I have some doubts about my graphics card working well with AE, but I don't know if that could be related or not. 

You're probably "blackholing" due to too much RAM and one of the audio components not being able to handle it. An excursion to your device manager and doing a right-click to "Check for new and updated drivers" could be a solution as could be comletele removing those drivers and letting them reinstall after booting into safe mode. Also check your Printers & Devices panel. Windows is terrible at cleaning up and a device like a Bluetooth headset that you don't even have anymore could be lingering there and mess up things.

Mylenium 

Screenshot of the project. Using a camera as you see, several PSD files, a precomp which has some AI files in it, and a wave file.

I also turned off all effects to see if it helped with memory usage. Even with this, I have the problem:

(and if anyone can shed light on why Teams is showing here, please do. It is not a startup app and is not currently running as confirmed in my task list).