P: Constant freezing making editing next to impossible

Hi Amy,
I will try to do that this week,  I’m underwater right now, so it’s not an option timewise. 

This has been going on for months now, and it has been reported by many users through the channels Adobe asks us to use.

In the meantime, the practical solution for many of us has been to revert to an older version that actually works, while continuing to pay for the current software because we have active projects and depend on Premiere professionally.

At this point, I think Adobe owes users a clear answer.

Is this problem officially acknowledged?

If it is, has Adobe identified the cause?

If the cause is known, is there a fix being actively worked on?

And if Adobe still does not know the cause after months of reports, users should be told that clearly as well.

What is becoming increasingly difficult to accept is the lack of a clear status while multiple updates are released and the freezing problem remains.

We are not asking for unrealistic guarantees. We are asking for transparency about a serious issue that is affecting paying users and forcing some of us to remain on older versions simply to keep working.

How is this still an issue in the newest versions? How many broken updates will we receive?

Still unresolved after over a month. Freezing for 20-30seconds everytime i switch windows to something else. This is so unprofesisonal.

This is already a known, reported bug – (https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-728/premiere-pro-26-3-freezes-when-opening-preferences-sequence-settings-or-effect-controls-1628725), Adobe has acknowledged it and suggests it has traced the cause. It is still not fixed. It's present in 26.5 and 26.5.1, the current releases, exactly as it was back in 26.2 and 26.3. Premiere freezes hard during normal editing - slip and move edits, keyboard trims, opening Preferences or Sequence Settings - going fully unresponsive for anything from a few seconds to several minutes before recovering on its own. And it's seems to be tied to Windows accessibility tools running, which is the major problem here.

My setup:

• Premiere 26.5.1 (also 26.5.0 and 26.3.2 build 2; also seen in 25.6.6 build 5)
• Windows 11 25H2 (26200.9168)
• Core Ultra 9 285K (24 cores / 24 threads), 128 GB RAM, RTX 4090

When it freezes, one CPU core sits pinned while everything else idles - around 5-6% of total on a 24-thread chip, which is one core maxed out - then it lets go. This doesn’t occur in versions prior to 26.2.

Things I've tried that made no difference:

• Disabling UI GPU acceleration (Preferences > General)
• The last three NVIDIA drivers versions, both Game Ready and Studio, with a clean install
• Clearing caches and resetting preferences

The same freeze shows up in v26.x of After Effects too, less often - opening the Text/Character panel, the top menus, or Preferences, which suggests it is tied in with the general UI upgrades of the previous 2 versions.

The previous post already suggests the issue has been found: Windows accessibility features. Magnifier, Power Automate, anything that hooks into the Windows accessibility layer sets it off, with a fix planned for v27. It lines up with what I see: the freezes happen while Magnifier is running, and if I terminate Magnifier mid-freeze, Premiere usually comes back within a few seconds - not always, but most of the time.

Adobe's official workaround is this: don't use accessibility tools.

That is unacceptable. You are telling anyone who depends on assistive technology to stop using it so your software will run. That is not a workaround - it means Premiere is currently unusable for people who need accessibility tools, full stop. For a professional application at this price, in 2026, from a company that publishes accessibility commitments, that is indefensible.

And the fix is parked in v27 - the next major version. That forces anyone hitting this onto a new release just to get a working product, and mid-project you can't simply make that jump: moving a live production across to a zero-numbered build is a terrible, non-real world workflow. Adobe shipped this in 26.2. Adobe appears has diagnosed it. It has to be fixed in 26, now - not held behind the next annual release while accessibility users go without.

I'll provide a dump, wait chain, or repro steps on request. But this needs to be corrected for the current version stack. It needs to be owned as an accessibility failure and fixed urgently.

I can’t believe 26.5 actually shipped with this bug. 

Same here. I already purchased a course for Resolve, Premiere has been buggy for years and Adobe is sleeping

I found a solution in another thread that resolved this for me - Uninstall power automate

Hi. I found a way to fix the interface lag issue in Premiere Pro 26.3.

1. In the upper left corner, open "Edit" → "Preferences" → "General."
2. Find the "Render UI using GPU acceleration" setting.
3. Disable it.
4. Click "OK." If Premiere asks you to restart the program, do so.

After disabling it, my interface lag completely disappeared. The Timeline became smooth again, the playhead began moving normally during playback, and the Premiere window itself no longer stutters when moving.

Before disabling it, CPU and GPU usage were low, so the issue appears to be related to GPU rendering of the Premiere interface, not a performance issue.

I have an RTX 2050 Laptop + Intel Core i5-12450H + 16GB of RAM. So far, Premiere Pro 26.3 works fine after disabling this setting.

But a strange bug has appeared: after disabling GPU rendering of the interface, I started experiencing graphical artifacts. For example, after moving a window or interface element, a "ghost" or trace of it may remain in its original location, which doesn't immediately redraw.

This problem with the Premiere Pro interface has been going on since the 25x version. I only discovered today that you can disable "Render user interface using graphics acceleration." At least, it worked for me. Adobe doesn't want to fix anything.