Specific Platform Categories lock up after scrolling for a short time

[flighty]

As the title says- Launchbox (but not Bigbox) is almost entirely freezing after a short amount of scrolling through games in at least a couple platform categories. If I click a different category, Launchbox will stay frozen for about another minute before switching to it, and then everything suddenly runs normally unless I go back the the problem category and scroll again. I'm assuming something got corrupted within these categories, but I don't know what to look for.
Things I've tried while attempting to troubleshoot:

• Deleting my current theme, installing and using "Airy"
• Reinstalling overtop of my current installation
• Removing all music, manuals, videos, and images from the problematic platform categories
• Deleting all music and manual file paths from game metadata from the problematic categories
• Select All, "Update Metadata and Media for Selected Games..."  --->  "Yes, download and replace all existing metadata and media" for the problematic categories
• Checking the log file to see what Launchbox is doing while it is freezing up. (It's possible there's something helpful there, but I'm not seeing anything suspicious)
• Switching between WMP and FFmpeg video playback. Yes, I removed all media, but the log suggested that Launchbox was still looking for media to play, so I tried this just in case.
• Windows Settings > System > Storage > Temporary files > "Remove files"
• Admin Command Prompt "sfc /SCANNOW" and "DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth"

What should my next steps be? This is has been going on for months and I don't have a trustworthy data backup to attempt to restore without rolling back a very very long time, so I would like to try other solutions first, if anyone has any ideas other than starting completely fresh?

(None of this was at all helpful. See my reply below for more details about the issue.)

Edited yesterday at 08:16 AM by flighty
added more attempted troubleshooting steps and mention of my reply below.

[Jayinem]

Right click on Windows button in bottom left and choose Command Prompt (Admin)

type this in

sfc /SCANNOW

return

then when it's done type 

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

return

May or may not help, but it's something to try. If your Launchbox in on a different hdd than C then type cd E: or F: or whatever the drive letter is before doing these. 

If that doesn't help I would install a fresh Launchbox from Launchbox.com in a new location, then copy your data, themes, LBthemes folders and if you use music copy that folder same for videos from the current one to the new one so that you don't lose anything and see if that helps. In this case you're starting fresh yet keeping your data at the same time. 

Edited Tuesday at 03:13 PM by Jayinem

[flighty]

I tried everything I could think of, gave up, downloaded and installed a fresh copy of Launchbox 13.25, and began re-importing my library. I got my roms and their metadata and box art imported, then fair way into my Steam Library (many hours wasted at this point) when the new installation started locking up just like the previous version. There has been no crash, I have not added any plugins, I am doing nothing but entering missing metadata and images. This never happened on the older versions of Launchbox.

After more testing, there seems to be some wild inefficiency or leak going on. 
For context: Windows 11 Home 25H2, AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR5 RAM, Intel Arc B580 12GB GPU, and Launchbox is running off its own dedicated Samsung 1TB NVME drive.
Normal desktop usage (such using this forum, or browsing social media) will show between 0-3% CPU average usage, and 0-8% average GPU usage, 8% spikes being media-heavy doomscrolling. Here's a screenshot of what my Task Manager is showing after just seconds of scrolling my Launchbox library, up to where it locks up entirely (web browser closed, No music, no videos, only scrolling 2D box-fronts):

(The sharp drop-off from 100% is Launchbox freezing)

Edited yesterday at 08:05 AM by flighty
more detail added and Task Manager Performance screenshot added