Adobe Media Encoder Suddenly Rendering 5x Slower After Installing After Effects

Hello everyone, Yesterday, my Adobe Media Encoder was working perfectly fine. I was rendering a 15-minute 4K video in about 10 minutes. However, today, the same type of project takes over an hour to render! The only change I made was installing  Adobe After Effects and adding a few templates to it.

I’ve tried everything:
- Restarting my computer
- Checking CPU/GPU usage (no issues)
- Reinstalling Adobe Media Encoder and Premiere Pro
- Changing export and renderer settings (Mercury GPU Acceleration, Software Only, etc.)
- Clearing cache and resetting preferences

I also tried disabling Dynamic Link, but when I do that, Premiere Pro doesn’t send the project to Media Encoder at all. No matter what I try, the render times are still 5-6 times longer than before.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? Could After Effects have caused some background processes to slow down Media Encoder? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!