Thanks so much for the reply Wallace,
I can confidently say no to all of your questions above. I wish it was something that simple.
I seemed to have temporarily fixed the problem yesterday but its back today…
The issue was the size of the working area – if I shortened it, previewing was fine. So this must be some sort of space issue. Its back in full force today though – Ive shortened my working area to a few frames and I still cant preview the footage. Ive purged the disk cache and still, nothing. I really dont know how to fix this for good.
Thanks in advance for your guidance