Photoshop keeps not responding - I suspect Bitdefender and am using Windows 10

Hello,

I started having severe trouble with Photoshop not responding - forcing me to quit it from the task manager without saving my most recent progress. To clarify, it is not "poofing", and I am not getting any autosaves... it just freezes and then I am forced to hard quit the program. 

We determined that the firewall from Bitdefender was interfering, so we added rules for Photoshop and Adobe Cloud in general to access the web. This seemed to help... for a while.

But now I am having the same issue, at about the same pace. I do tend to work on large file sizes, and I am digitally painting. I currently have the scratch drive located locally on C. I suppose that could be getting too full or something, but I haven't been seeing capacity errors... And anyway the issue occurs roughly every 15 min, but irregularly... so I don't think it is filling up. It's more like something is getting blocked or not communicating correctly. 

Also I am using 8 bit color. My current set up cannot handle 16 bit - also not sure if that is normal. I should have enough ram and everything... 

Does anyone know what this is and how to fix it? I need to increase my productivity and right now I am pretty scared of losing progress. Thanks in advance!

Sincerely,

April