Media Encoder 2019 issues

Ever since updating to AME CC 2019 in the middle of last month my normal workflow of bulk exporting clips from Premiere has turned into a nightmare.

At some point during the middle of nearly every batch of clips, AME stops encoding correctly, leaving some exported clips unmuxed and the rest at 0 kb. The only way to get it to work again is to shut down AME and start it up again, and even then it doesn't work half the time until I restart my PC.

During this last round I've had Task Manager open. AME successfully complete a batch of 20 files. When it was done, Task Manager showed that it was clinging to 1GB+ of RAM.

I did a second batch, only half of which exported successfully. By the end of that, Task Manager showed it was holding on to 2.5GB of RAM, even though its job was finished. I ran a RAM cleaning tool, which got AME down to .5MB of RAM. Then I retried the failed files from the previous batch. None of them encoded. So I closed AME, but it's still showing in the Task Manager 20 minutes later. And, over the 20 minutes since I closed it, AME has grown from consuming .5MB of RAM to 22MB. What is it doing?

So, it's not releasing RAM or closing completely. I don't know whether these issues are related to its consistent failure to complete batch exports from Premiere, but it's making my workflow take 3-4 times (or more) longer than it should to keep closing programs, re-exporting, hoping a batch will work, trying again when it doesn't, etc. This update needs some serious Q/A.