Audition keeps freezing/not responding for a few minutes

Intermittently on some projects (but not all), Audition will hang for a minute or two every minute or so. If I'm playing it'll usually keep playing, but if I delete a clip while playing, or skip backward a few seconds, or save, it'll go "not responding" for 1-2 minutes, but only sometimes (only if a minute or two has passed since the last freeze-up). Obviously, this is really disruptive and makes it impossible to focus on the work for more than a few seconds at a time.

I'm not sure what all specs are helpful for debugging this issue, or how to submit a crash report (even though this isn't really a crash). I'm using the Podcast preset for a multitrack session. I'm running off my C: HDD which I know isn't recommended, but Task Manager and Resource Monitor don't show audition touching the disk almost at all, and anyway that shouldn't cause multiple minutes of hanging. My machine has an i5 and 32 GB of RAM, with the page file entirely disabled. I'm not using almost any significant effects, most of my audio processing was done on the original audio file and saved as a .wav. I only have two hour-long channels, which are chopped into a few dozen smaller pieces. Some projects I've done have had more audio files chopped into more pieces and with more effects, and have edited perfectly smoothly, so I'm pretty confident it's not an issue inherent to my machine or editing pipeline.

I do have "auto save recovery data" set to 5 minutes and backups every 10 minutes, and made sure that Audition knows it's welcome to 16GB of my RAM (I don't have anything else significant running at the same time).

Any thoughts? Please advise, Audition is almost entirely unusable if I can only get a minute of work done every 3-5 minutes of wall time.