Preview Rendering delayed for some time when loading a project or composition

The subject doesn't do the issue justice.

When I load a project, After Effects doesn't begin to render the preview for a long time. Not that it takes a long time to actually render, but it doesn't begin the preview render for SEVERAL minutes.

This has also extended to the final render as well. Sometimes, when I tell AE to render, it will act like it will start rendering - the Render button and Queue in AME buttons are placed by pause and cancel, but the render progress bar doesn't change to the blue/grey striped working bar for an indeterminite period of time.

Yes, some of the projects I'm loading aren't small, but they aren't the largest I've ever opened. Granted, there are quite a few expressions, but I would anticipate that would affect the actual rendering and not when the application begins the render.

For example, I just opened a small composition with only two pieces of footage and no expressions from the project right before starting this post. There was no preview loaded (just all gray in the preview screen). The Frame Render Time showed 0 ms, until it rendered, when it showed 572 ms. Half a second is not several minutes.

Latest version of AE - 24.3.0, latest Nvidia drivers on Windows. Everything's up to date.