Intense menu lag

For the last 24 hours the game has become almost unplayable due to some strange menu lag.
I don't experience any issue when I am in a dungeon or in over-world combat. But, gathering, crafting, and even just using vendors is unbearable laggy. Even with auto gathering turned on, once i select what to collect from a node, the pick-axe will swing at odd rhythms sometimes taking 5 or 6 seconds between swings. When trying to craft, the buttons are unresponsive. When r-clicking on a vendor, they will turn to face me and then I end up waiting forever for the menu to pop up.
I've tried a number of solutions already, such as reinstalling, installing to an SSD, and other minor tweaks. I doubt this is a hardware issue though as this only begun yesterday and I'm not experiencing such lag elsewhere in this or in other games.
Dos anyone else have this problem?

check your connection to the server. do a traceroute. if you're lagging there's probably a dropped/bad connection somewhere along the line.

My ping is fine. If thre were in issue with latency I would experience lag in combat, but I'm not suffering at all in combat situations. This problem persists in gathering, crafting, and interacting with NPC's.
Basically, any time there are "menu windows" or NPC dialog, there are obscenely long response times from whatever I am interacting with.
The game has become unplayable for me.