Blender

I'm learning Blender as I'd like to try it out as a tool for 2D animation. I was following a tutorial on making a bouncing ball. Everything was fine until we started adding materials, ever since, Blender has become very unstable. I can be doing fine following along with the tutorial but then if I hit space to play and then space to stop playback, either the whole thing freezes and the UI is unresponsive yet the force quite menu reports no issue with Blender that would indicate it wasn't responding, or, it renders bizarre frames that are not at all what I drew before then crashing in the manner described again.

The only way I can fix it is by reloading the project file but even then sometimes even after I've restarted the session, the fucked up frames that don't correspond to anything I actually did as part of the project appear at random intervals. At first I thought maybe they'd tweaned that way and they're really part of the project, but the same frames don't always display the weird artifacting or incorrect shape of things I've drawn. you can move the playhead to a frame, see something wrong with it, move it away to another frame, move back to that original problem frame and suddenly it no longer has the issue, but now another frame will. Sometimes the whole sequence is suddenly ok again but I live in fear of the next crash.