Premiere Pro 26.3 freezes and stops responding when interacting with menus/UI on Lenovo Legion 5 with RTX 3060 (Premiere 25.5 works normally)

Premiere Pro 26.3 becomes unstable and repeatedly freezes when interacting with the application UI. Opening menus, changing settings, or performing basic UI actions causes Premiere to hang and eventually stop responding.

This issue does not occur in Premiere Pro 25.5 on the same computer. The same hardware, drivers, and Windows installation work correctly with Premiere Pro 25.5, Photoshop, and After Effects.

This appears to be a Premiere Pro 26.x-specific compatibility issue

I tried every fix listed online such as 

• Completely uninstalled and reinstalled Premiere Pro.
• Installed previous versions of Premiere Pro 26.x.
• Reset Premiere preferences/settings.
• Disabled third-party plugins.
• Cleared Premiere media cache.
• Updated NVIDIA drivers.
• Performed a clean NVIDIA driver reinstall.
• Used Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) to completely remove and reinstall graphics drivers.
• Tested Premiere using both GPUs:
  • NVIDIA RTX 3060 Laptop GPU
  • Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics

And after all of that I decided to try an earlier version of premiere (I know that was probably something I should’ve done earlier) and when trying version 25.5 the issue ceased. Hope this can help anyone having a similar problem.