HTC Vive - Framerate drops to 0.1 FPS until editor restarted

I am not sure if this is related to Unity or to the crappy drivers of the HTC Vive, but since Unity 2018.3, me and my team have had this issue where after entering play mode a few times, the editor would sometimes end up in a state where starting play mode causes SteamVR_Render to take over 16,000 ms per frame, and the editor to lock up completely. Last time, Unity crashed all together. Restarting Unity solves the problem and the game runs at 300 fps in play mode again. Note that i don't actually have to restart SteamVR to solve the issue, and i am using a rather old version of the SteamVR plugin, so it shouldn't be related to any recent update to SteamVR (which worked fine earlier).