Accessing App Drawer

[Crunch29]

I have several 3rd-Party apps that need access to the app drawer during their setup, e.g. selecting which apps to place on the "dashboard" (CarHome Ultra) or which apps to have easy access to through an app launcher. Recently, when I try to add new apps or to replace the ones I selected previously, my phone freezes up and kicks back to the previous screen. Sometimes it freezes immediately; other times it freezes only after I've started to scroll through the apps in the app drawer.
Does anyone have any ideas on what is causing this or how it can be fixed? (I've called both Samsung and Google PlayStore, but as usual their only suggestion was a soft reboot (didn't help) or a factory reset.)