Premiere 2021 not opening in Windows 10 - hangs or crashes

[Zeesy]

I'm unable to load any of my projects in PP. Yesterday PP would close before the launch screen, which resolved after I updated through CC. I was able to work most of the day, but by evening my projects no longer open. The Open Project bar loads, then hangs at about 5/6 of the way through. This happens with older versions of my project, including auto-saves. The only way I can close What's causing this issue?

Steps:

- Turned off Mercury Transmit

- Clear Media Cache

- Quit PP

- Open new project, then opened current project from there (doesn't open)

- Quit using Task manager

- restart computer

- open new project in PP, import project (Not Responding window)

- Quit PP using Task Manager

- Open new project then open auto-save file (project hangs)

- Cancel project load

- PP freezes

Specs:

- AMD Ryzen 7 3800X

- Nvidia RTX 3090

- 32GB RAM

- 1TB boot drive

- 2TB storage

Screencaps:

Results from importing project file

Project never loads past this point (I've waited)

Current settings for video playback

[Zeesy]

Update: I transferred my project folder from my internal HDD to my internal SDD, and reproduced the above steps, which reproduce the same problems. Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have a deadline to meet.

[Zeesy]

Another update: The project did eventually open after about 15-20 minutes from both drives. I appreciate that the drive type, amount of footage and type of codec impacts performance, but this project was running fine (albeit a little slowly) up until the most recent upgrade. No additional footage was imported into the project, and no Dynamic Links were created. What's going on?