Spot Removal Tool EXTREMELY Slow

About 2 releases ago, I began to have an issue where the spot removal tool, intermittently, takes a VERY long time - like 10 to 15 seconds to do a simple white dot removal on a uniform black background.  I’ve tried to work through it, hoping Adobe would fix the problem, but this is absolutely killing my productivity.  

System:

• I9 285K
• RTX 5070 TI
• 64BG DDR5
• Asus  ProArt Z890-CREATOR WIFI MB
• Win 11 64
• Latest updates and drivers for everything

Settings:

• Generative AI Off
• Remove after every click
• Spot size ~ 35
• Nothing but Bridge and PS running

Problem Details:

PS is seemingly random as to when it has this issue.  I haven’t been able to discern any pattern.  I can be removing leaves from the surface of a pond, for example.  I will click on 2 or 3 leaves and they are removed almost instantaneously (as was always the case before this problem appeared) with good results.  The next leaf I click on, a popup appears and the progress bar creeps across.  8 to 20 seconds later, it finishes.  It might do that again on the next leaf, or might be instantaneous again.  There is no difference in the size, shape, pattern of the leaf or the background.  I can click on a simple, 8 pixel wide black spot on a leaf and PS will take 15 seconds to remove it.  I can also remove a telephone pole with support wires on a complex rocky, bushy background and PS will complete the removal in less than one second, and do it well.  All of this on the same open file.

By the way, I built a completely new PC last month, so by definition, everything was a fresh install.  These problems have persisted across systems.

Observations:

When PS removes the spot/area quickly, there is a very slight uptick in GPU activity.  When the popup appears and the progress bar crawls, PS pegs the GPU at 100% for several seconds.  (Pegging a 5070 TI for 10-20 seconds is a LOT of graphics processing.)

Even though I have Generative AI turned off, I see a spike in network traffic at precisely the same time as PS pegs the GPU, every time.  When PS removes the spot quickly, there is no network traffic - zero.

If anyone has any ideas on what could be causing this issue, I would REALLY appreciate your help.  As I said above, this absolutely killing my productivity.

Other things I’ve noticed trying to diagnose this issue:

There are 20-30 instances of Adobe Crash Processor.exe running continuously.  When PS and Bridge are running but idle, all of them are constantly writing to disk.  A few are also constantly reading from disk.  My disk usage averages ~ 120 KB/s.

About 30% of the time, when I finish editing a file in PS, I cannot bring Bridge back to the foreground by clicking on the taskbar icon.  I have to minimize PS to see Bridge.  When that happens, the next time I enter PS by opening a file from Bridge, PS is no long maxamized - it’s windowed instead.  Also, when I save a file, the file/save popup reverts to its default upper-left position, even though I moved it to the center of the screen when saving the last file.