After Ableton crashed, my PC is very slow

Hey everyone! Posting this here to see if anyone else has similar experiences. Was working on a project last week when Ableton slowly crashed. Now, 5 days later, almost every other program or browser on my PC is running poorly.

What I remember happening: opened a VST plug-in in Ableton, though if I recall, I dragged the actually VST file onto the audio track rather than the plug-in's folder. I'm new to plug-ins, so I made a mistake. The plug-in attempted to open (Skybox JST pedal) and my headphones made like a strange, pressuring pop noise? Just one or two. They weren't loud, but they almost felt like barometric pressure? Like it made my ears throb for a few hours lol.

So, Ableton crashes. That's fine, I realized what I did as soon as I did it. Reopened Ableton, it ran like shit, so I closed everything and restarted my computer. Opened Ableton again, everything worked fine and I was able to complete my work for the day.

In the following days, I noticed frame rate drops in games and videos, as well as input delay when browsing Google Chrome. Had a video-call on Discord on Saturday, and that was also met with poor performance. Also that popping noise, like someone clapped right by my ear. Last night I try to game a little bit, and none of my games are playable. The screen is near-frozen, that damn popping noise happened again, and my computer crashes.

No new downloads or updates to any programs, the pedal has been on my hard drive for months. Everything worked fine until Ableton crashed last week.

Has anyone else ever experienced this? And what the hell is the popping in my headphones??

Specs:

Windows 10

ASIO4ALL audio driver

behringer u-phoria interface

CPU AMD Ryzen 5 2600

32GB RAM

3TB SSD storage

GPU NVIDEO GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

All drivers up to date.