RAM usage spikes up right after opening project!

I am desperate.

I was working on a project with no problems at all, despite the project size being pretty big (~350mb). It was working fine. Then out of nowwhere, things went sour.

Now when I open the project, it is fine for a couple of seconds. Then I can slowly see the RAM usage increasing over a 1 minute period, and then fluctuating between 90-98%. I can't do anything, not even saving the project without it sending Premiere Pro crashing. 

I have tried sooo many things already. 

-First thing I had to do was re-install some .Dll files that had gone missing after the first Premiere crash and prevented me from even opening the project in the first place.

-Ran a disk check CHKDSK. It found some errors but said it fixed them. No difference.

-Uninstalled premiere pro

-Cleaner tool for premiere pro

-Updated Premiere to the latest version

-When I re-opened this project with the latest version... it worked! A miracle! Then I closed premiere, and when I came back a couple of hours later and re-opened it, the problem was back. 

-I had a repetitive warning message that Premiere was missing the Adobe Devanagiri font. Installed it, no difference.

-As soon as I opened the project, I deleted the entire sequence I was working on to see if there was something there (a video file, an effect, a color correction) which was the cause of all this problem. No difference.

-Changed the allocated RAM in preferences. No difference.

-Cleared media cache. No difference.

-Reset all preferences. No difference.

-Imported the project into a new project. No difference.

One weird thing: I have been working on this project for a lonnngg time, and the project size increased, but gradually over a year (around 350mb). Between yesterday and today, however, I re-opened the project (which had to be conformed to the newest premiere pro version (14), and the project size blew up to ~420mb! Without me making a single change! What could be the cause of that?

Another important detail: other premiere pro projects on this same computer work completely fine, even large ones. 

I don't know what to do, this computer is a beast and clearly the issue is not enough computing power because the CPU and GPU are practically unused during all this (GPU is either at 0 or 3%0), but the RAM is at 98%. 

I would like to contact Adobe Support and have someone on their team give a look at it remotely, but I can't even get in touch with them because I'm a student and we're supposed to have an admin support for our school but they're not much help.

Please help!