Premiere Pro won't play footage (but in a way I've never run into)

I used to be an editor for a living and used Premiere Pro for that whole time. I still use it regularly for my personal projects and recently it's been doing something I can't get around and has locked up any work I try to do.

The main problem: Clips won't play.

However, I've run into this issue before and a quick clearing of the media cache folder fixes the issue. This time though, the issue is different. It's behaving weird.

Every time I click the play button it switches to the stop button as normal, nothing plays and I don't hear anything (once I did hear the audio), then after one or two seconds, the button switches back to the play button and nothing happens. Occasionally, it plays the clip for a few frames then stops.

I've cleared the cache, I've tried every renderer (I'm using Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA)), I've made proxies, I've changed harddrives, I've even uninstalled and reinstalled.

I'm literally dead in the water till I can get this fixed so any suggestions would be great.