rendering x export issues

I am running FCPX on a new iMac with 3.2 GHz & 24 GB. Ever since I have upgraded to High Sierra and FCPX 10.4 I have had constant render and export issues. This occurs even with one event loaded, where as before this upgrade I used to be able to have several projects in FCPX at once. The background rendering works fine until about 3 minutes into a project, then it starts freezing and in turn makes it impossible to export (freezes at 10-15%). I have read several forums: I've deleted the rendered files in the library and event, turned off background rendering, copy and pasted into a new event/project, reload my clips, etc and nothing is working.

Tonight, the progress meter or wheel in the upper left hand corner is not even monitoring progress. It's just a black circle with a blue outline. Additionally, when I open the background tasks, nothing is happening. Yet, there are white dots across the whole project and if I quite FCP, it takes a long time cancelling background tasks. Please help!