Lightroom lagging, freezing, not exporting, and not saving my edits!

For reference before I begin, I have the creative suite installed an an external hard drive plugged into my PC. I recently went on my computer and found that the entire creative suite wasn't accessible and I had to redownload everything. Just to be safe I ended up cleaning out creative cloud off of my PC and then redownloaded that before reinstalling each program. 

Since everything has been reinstalled, I'm running into some issues that I've never dealt with before. For one, Lightroom is running a lot slower than normal. It's taking longer to load previews and begin editing than before. Sometimes the photos will just look pixelated and never load the actual preview. And no, the pictures I took are not blurry. It will also freeze occasionally or lag. Sometimes when it freezes I'll close out the app, and then reopen it to find that all of my edits have made are gone and I have to redo them. It's very frustrating. Right now it also does not want to export anything, not even one photo at a time. I go through the export process and it shows the bar at the top, but the progress is stuck at the beginning and refuses to move. So I close the app, reopen it, and my edits are gone again. 

I run all of my apps on my gaming PC, so it definitely should not be acting up this much. I utilized the live tech support line and after talking to the person it seemingly worked without issue for the rest of the day, but when I began to edit my next batch of photos, it began to mess up just the same as before. It is completely up to date and I've tried a few other solutions to similar problems, but couldn't find anything online for what I've been dealing with specifically. This has been the most frustrating experience since I need to use Lightroom to do my work.

Does anyone have any ideas? I really need this fixed! Thank you.