This might help if anyone has had similar problems.
I was routinely looking at the spinning wheel of doom when trying to swap between any folders in Bridge and often had to force stop the program.
I had Bridge installed on C drive, but had my cache location on D drive as it needed space not available on C.
This week I moved the cache from D to C (same as the program) and instantly all the "not responding" messages have stopped and I can use Bridge as I want to. This was also an issue in Bridge 2022, but it was magnified when I updated to 2023.
Hope this is of use to someone as it has frustrated me for ages
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