Squeezelite freezing raspberry pi

Hi all,

I'm tearing my hair out, so I'm hoping someone might have some advice to help me.

I've been trying for days to get a stable Squeezelite running on one of my Pi's, but every time I initiate Squeezelite it slows the Pi down and starts skipping badly (SSH also slows to an unresponsive crawl, despite CPU/Memory resources looking fine).

I've tried both PiCorePlayer and also Raspbian Lite - both show the same behavior.

Changing network setup hasn't fixed it, different USB DAC made no difference, different power supply made no change.

Any ideas? Any suggestions on stuff I should try?