Animate keeps crashing/ freezing when i import png files for use as background images

I've receently been having a lot of trouble with animate. It used to work perfectly fine for me to drag and drop png files into my animation, but recently that has stopped working  (so has import to stage and import to library). Instead, the animate window freezes and waiting for half an hour, i've observed no change. This happens now every time i try to import a png file (no matter the size) and comes after animate somehow corrupted (?) a file i had been working on for a week and i can no longer open that either.