ME wastes an hour "preparing" unnecessary audio tracks for simple 6 minute 2 audio track export

Can anyone explain what is going on? I am exporting a number of very simple 2 stereo track one video track 6 minute videos from Premiere. Yet, ME will spend an hour "preparing" the audio, often between 35 and 170 tracks!!

This is not an isolated event, it's happening on every export. There is no rhyme of reason to it.  Using 14.3.2. No effects have ben added to the audio whatsoever.

Has anyone seen this before and is there any workaround. It's really annoying that it takes 8 minutes to export the video and 90 minutes to "prepare" simple audio. I attach a couple of screen grabs to see if anyone can sort this out. It's incredibly annoying!