Kontakt is giving me the spinning wheel whenever I "touch" it

Hello everyone,

I'm supposed to work on a new project. I loaded my template and wanted to start writing but couldn't because Logic Pro 11 is reacting suspiciously slow. Especially Kontakt (and that is any of the Kontakts from 5-8) is giving me the spinning wheel of death and crashing my AU-bridge whenever I am trying to use is. I open Kontakt in Logic, if I am lucky it works, then I have to change the view back to classic rack view (for some reason Kontakt forgot that that was my default view). That alone is giving me the wheel for quite a while. If I am lucky and the AU-bridge does not crash, I might be able to do something else. But everything I do leads to the spinning wheel. It is really driving me crazy, I need to work, but I can't because this is rendering my system useless. I have a second older computer that is showing exactly the same behavior (One is a MacBook Pro M1Max running Ventura and one is a MacBook Pro M4Max running Sequoia). I'm suspecting, it may be the external drive containing all my libraries. But in every test, it comes out as ok. But it is the only thing, expect from the software both share, that they have in common. Any thoughts on that?

Cheers,
Tina