Hi Stephen,
First off, thank you for replying to me to try and resolve my issue.
All of the assets were loaded from one folder on my external hard drive (which I admit isn't the best way of doing it but it's worked for 18 weddings and countless other smaller projects). Once I started noticing how slowly premiere was running, I transfered all my files to my internal HDD, figuring that it was the issue. Sadly, the problems presisted.
All of my projects, old and new relative to the project that started giving me the issue, run terribly. I can't even watch 2 seconds of video without the program locking up my computer and make everything extremely slow. I'm assuming it's because of all the pressure on the CPU. As soon as I stop playing the footage premiere's overall CPU usage drops down to 10-20% and the computer starts running quickly again.
The 500gb drive is internal.
I really have no idea what is going on considering that everything else on my computer as well as the rest of my Adobe products (photoshop, after effects, in design primarily) run perfectly smooth with no issues whatsoever. Is there a way to do a 'deep' uninstall? Maybe I missed something somewhere in my attempts to reinstall and reboot the program.
Thank you again,