Lightroom Import Freezes Hangs Is Nearly Worthless

[AndrewDodsonPhotography]

Out of nowhere, trying to Import in Lightroom has become impossible. I click and have to wait minutes. It hangs. It freezes. If I click too many times, it crashes. What used to only take a minute or so is now taking nearly a half hour or more. It's taking forever to move between menus. Takes forever to load folders of pictures. Takes forever to do anything.

When I started, I created a catalog on a SSD external drive (I've done this many times before to the same drive without issue). To see if it was an external drive issue, I switched to a different catalog on an internal SSD and attempted to import. The same issue occured. So I don't believe it's an external/internal drive issue.

I'm running the latest Windows 10 update. I'm running the latest Lightroom Classic version. I think Windows may have updated a few nights ago (?) I also updated all my Adobe programs night before last as well. So maybe a compatibility issue?

I have an MSI Tomahawk motherboard, Windows 10, AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 128GB RAM, GeoForce RTX 3060 with 12GB of RAM. I don't think it's a memory issue.

I recall having this problem a while back but can't remember how it was solved. Helpful, right?

I've reset presets. I've reinstalled. I've rebooted several times. It just seems like it happened all of a sudden overnight.

I have four shoots this coming weekend and feel like puking if it's going to be like this. There's literally no way I can process shoots if Lightroom is going to crawl like this.

[DdeGannes]

Welcome to the forum.

Please have a look at the community guidelines. See the screen capture. It is important that we know the actual version number of your Operating system and the Application you are referring to.

[GoldingD]

I've reinstalled

Have you tried rolling back to a previous version?

I've rebooted several times.

We're any of those a cold boot?

also:

Please post your System Information as Lightroom Classic (LrC) reports it. In LrC click on Help, then System Info, then Copy. Paste that information into a reply. Please present all information from first line down to and including Plug-in Info. Info after Plug-in info can be cut as that is just so much dead space to us non-Techs.

[TheDigitalDog]

Try resetting your preferences: 

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/setting-preferences-lightroom.html

[AndrewDodsonPhotography]

So I will go ahead and apologize because the issue DID turn out to be the external SSD. When I removed it and reconnected it, Windows said that it had discovered an error on the drive. Once Windows scanned and repaired the drive, everything seems to be working as it should. I've created two new catalogs and imported without issue.