After effects is filling up C: drive and crashing despite caching to E: drive

Hello all. I have looked for help on Reddit, and on this community but so far haven't found a solution. 

I have AE installed on my C: drive, and have set all the Media and Disk Cache to my E: drive which has plenty of space. However, as soon as I load my comp into the render cue, my C: drive fills up, I run out of memory, and AE crashes. The size of clip doesnt matter, the complexity of the editing does not matter, even if I have caching disabled in Preferences, this still happens. Even if I start a new project without closing AE, my C: drive remains full until AE crashes and I have to restart. 

My drives are working fine, I've reinstalled AE 3 times, kept it updated to the newest version, I quadruple checked my caching settings, and yet this problem persists and seemed to just come up out of nowhere because I've edited small things on the same rig a few months ago with no issues. I've also used AE on worse computers for years without this issue. The only other issue I noticed that came up right before this, is Dynamic Link stopped working with Media Encoder. Besides that, I have no idea what is causing this or why. 

Any ideas? This is really screwing me over beucause I need to get some projects done but editing is impossible.