Eddie crashing on mac until restart

[Flamingo93 1]

Hi, I just started using Eddie v 2.21.8 yesterday on my macbook (running Sonoma 14.0) and have a really annoying problem - whenever I lock my screen for any period of time (longer than about 10mins or so) or close my macbook (so it's asleep) it crashes Eddie, and I have to force close. It doesn't work again until i restart my computer which is super annoying.  I also had an issue yesterday where it got stuck on loading with the error '"Raise system privileges" every time - but restarting my laptop seems to have fixed that. 
I've had a search through the forums and found some old posts of similar issues, but nothing recent (could be my subpar searching skills, apologies).

I'm not really knowledgeable in the ways of vpns and stuff so i'm not sure what to do here - is the only solution to restart my computer everytime i want to lock my screen?  I've used a few different providers before and never had this issue before - i'm not having the best start to using this, any advice? 
Thankyou! 

Edited ... by Flamingo93
i thought turning vpn off when locking screen fixed issue but it doesn't :-(

[gswds 0]

Freezing up on sleep - Sonoma 14.2.1 - Force quit and restart required. Please let me know if you find a solution.