Crash when Joining Clips/High Memory Usage

I’ve used Audacity over the last year on multiple computers with no problems. All of a sudden, a simple joining of two adjacent clips is crashing the program. This is occurring on multiple machines that each have a minimum of 16GB RAM. I updated version on one computer to the latest - still same problem. At times, the joining of clips doesn’t crash the program - it simply takes 30-40 seconds. Before, the operation would be instantaneous. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.