Bad UI performance on High-End machine

Hi,

i'm encountering performance issues even with very small projects. Preview & rendering speeds are fine, but the entire UI of the program is incredibly laggy and sluggish. Moving my cursor anywhere, selecting a layer, scrubbing the timeline - these things have about a second of delay. I am using After Effects 2024.

I am on a machine with 128 gb of RAM, of which 42 are allocated to my AE, an i9 12900K CPU and an RTX 3090.

I have tried the following:

- Launching After Effects in Safe Mode, disabling all third party plugins

- Disabling/Enabling Multi-Frame Rendering

- Purging all Memory & Disk Cache

- Disabling/Enabling CUDA GPU Acceleration in Project Settings

I have attached a video file, the project shown only has 2 MB in size; the composition only has 13 layers. When in an empty comp or a new project (FHD, 24 fps), the UI is still weirdly sluggish and laggy - although not as bad as in a marginally larger project, I do not recall it ever being this bad before.

Additionally - even in safe mode, with default preferences - opening the preferences takes at least 20 seconds of loading.

All of this makes using the program very difficult. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Ava