just pressing the "." button to play audio locks After Effects up for minutes

This is a new one to me. The question is this: If I am pressing the "." button just to hear the audio at that point in time, what does After Effects care about what's going on in terms of video? It's even doing this when caps lock is on, and also when I've turned off visibility on all the layers. The real irony is that if I go into the precomp to RAM preview without audio, it finishes faster than the time it takes my audio to start playing in the main comp. I've tried it in CS5, CS6, and on 2 different computers, with different audio files, and the problem persists. If the only thing I have in the main comp is audio, it seems to respond instantly. Audio plus precomps... now we've got a problem. I'm amazed this is the first time I've run into this if it's a bug that's been around a while.

I've gone through a bunch of precomps, and I think I might have an idea what's causing this, and if so, it's lame. I'm working on something with fairly high resolution Photoshop assets. Some are up to 7,000 pixels wide, which shouldn't be a problem (Most of these are in comps where they are scaled down to around 2K anyway). When I go into the precomps and start pre-rendering assets, eventually the audio starts to respond a little more normally (It's down to seconds of lag instead of minutes). Sure, it's great to pre-render when you can, but in some cases you want to keep noodling and timing to audio. Has anyone else experienced this and found a work-around other than pre-rendering everything?

Thanks,
Anthony

Thanks for the response, Dave. It's a WAV at the moment. I wish it were that simple. As I said, the audio plays fine in After Effects when it's the only thing in the timeline. The more Precomps I have in the timeline, the more time it stays locked up before playing, even with caps lock on, layer visibility turned off for all layers, or audio layer soloed.