Photoshop slow to open and takes up ~50 GB of space before any files are open

Hi, I am using photoshop 21.2.4 release on creative cloud.  I have a good maching and am running it on Mac Book Pro Catalina with 500 GB hard drive and 32 GB of RAM. I have 316.1 GB of free space on my laptop hard drive. I have an external drive available for extra scratch disc space if needed.  For the past few days Photoshop has been consistently giving me an error that states "file can not be saved due to program error".  If I change the name of the file or save in a different location then I have been able to save. That has been annoying, but today I have a bigger problem.    Just opening photoshop (which opens super slow) drops my free space down by 50 - 60 GB.  It just gets worse it I actually try to open a file.  Earlier today photoshop was running with a couple of files open. I went to save and got a warning that I was running out of disc space on my laptops hard drive which was unexpected as I had about 300 GB free.   Luckily I was able to save the files on my external drive and close out of photoshop.  Basically just closing photoshop gave me 140 GB back on my hard drive.  I understand photoshop needs space to to function, but 50 GB without any open files seems excessive.  Is there a known bug?  I reset my preferences already. Should I downgrade to a prior version?