Cannot Save Any File in Illustrator 2022

Hello community!

I know that this issue seems to have been posted a number of times, but I'm wondering if I am somehow doing something different. 

I am running Adobe Illustrator on Monterey 12.2. It has been working fine until a couple of days ago when I was getting a message box saying that it cannot save my .ai files. I am occassionally able to save it as a PDF, but if I try to then save that as an AI I get the same error message. 

For a bit I was able to workaround this by not saving my files to a specific folder I created (for instance if that file originated in the download folder, I would save an edited version in the same download folder and that would work?) However, now it's not letting me save at all. It's not a matter of saving copies because I can't even save a file that was fine, say, a week ago.

I've tried a couple of the work arounds here, but no dice. I really need this program to work as I have clients who are on super tight deadlines and in diffefent time zones. A day trying to fix this issue can lead to weeks in delay. 

Any help would be appreciated!