HELP!!! Inactive tracks, but not?

[groovilator]

I've been having ongoing problems already with playback because my computer is too slow but I've no other options to work with.
When I opened my first session for the day it gave me the old "CPU can't keep up" error. Same with all the sessions I tried.
Didn't know what to do so I figured I'd trash prefs for a start. Did the thing, restarted the computer, and when I opened up the session again all the tracks were grayed out, as if they'd all been disabled. So I right clicked thinking I'm going to activate them but that option wasn't there!
Instead of saying "Make selected tracks active" like I was expecting it says "Make selected tracks inactive". Same with all my other sessions.
WTF?!?!
Does this have something to do with trashing the prefs?
I will mention that when I started the computer up there were updates to install and I went ahead and did that. I'm wondering if that was somehow a bad move.
This sucks because I was supposed to finish this project today and now I'm hosed.
I'm going to try restarting again for lack of any other options but I'm not holding my breath.

Macbook Pro 17
2.4 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
SSD
Pro Tools 12