After Effects 25.3 will no longer open projects/allow me to create new ones.

Understood, @Davidcgc , and glad things are working for you now. If this happens again, try to remember about the new preference (mentioned above) that allows you to maintain your current workspace when importing another project. We're definitely interested in making this experience better, so feel free to respond to this thread at any point if the issue happens again.

Thanks,
- David, After Effects Engineering Team

@David.Arbor I had some time to risk a crash, but (un)fortunately, the bug seems to have been fixed in AE/Premiere 25.4, so no crash log from me.

I appreciate it. And I'd just like to reiterate, my issue isn't with anyone on the DVA team. I'll crash it at some point soon and send a log with email.

Edit: also, my default workspace matches my YDP workspace, so it definitely has non-standard things in it. But this is only an issue with projects that seem to be saved with the opposite workspace. Those were both made versions ago, so it is possible there's an issue there. But if I save a file and open it without changing workspaces, it doesn't have an issue.

Yup, I hear ya. All I can say is that yes, please do send those crash reports along with your email. If we can reproduce it in-house, we can fix it. If we can look at a crash log with the right details, we can pinpoint the issue. They don't always contain the clues, but they often do, and our engineers can see what's causing the crash.

On a personal note, as workspaces with docked ScriptUI and CEP panels were almost always the source of my crashes, I got in the habit of starting with fresh preferences each major version. I keep a folder with screenshots of my workspaces and prefs pane, so I reset those manually, and then I manually reset my keyboard shortcuts. It takes less than 10 minutes to setup, but obviously, who wants to have to do that?

You or anyone else here are always welcome to DM me or find me on MDA Slack if you want to chat further or troubleshoot problems. We try to respond to as many forum posts as we can, but we also have a great crew of Adobe Community Experts who help out (that's what I was before officially joining the team).

And yeah, I actually came across your video this morning and saw what you were referring to. My only thought is that something non-standard got saved into the Default workspace and messed things up, but again...that shouldn't be your problem to deal with. 

Thanks,
- David, After Effects Engineering Team

Haven't sent with my email in a while since things seem to often go unanswered and I'm usually too busy for the back and forth. I try to provide what info I can when I do until I get frustrated.

You're correct. In the past workspace crashes are often the fault of a script or something—I've run into that while developing. However I have two workspaces, one named YDP and Default that I use. I used to use YDP but then I kept having shared projects switch my workspaces to default (I didn't know they finally added that new feature, I'll have to check it out). So I changed default to be the same as YDP. All of the same scripts, exactly the same layout.

When I open a project after previously having used Default in AE, it crashes (seems to be if the project was saved in my YDP space). If it happens to get past the switching workspaces part before it crashes, I can quit the crashed AE, and open up the file without issue. If I open AE cleanly, switch back to YDP, and then open the file, it opens.

I don't know that sending you a project would crash it for you since my suspicion is that you have to have both workspaces and try to open a project using the one that wasn't saved in the file. But if you'd like I'll crash it, and include my email this time. I'm sure you've probably seen the video I posted yesterday on Workbench at this point, so you can also see it happen there, although I wasn't extremely detailed in how it happens since I wasn't planning on screen recording it when it happened.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

For the folks here that are experiencing this issue, are you getting the Crash Reporter dialog? If so, are you sending it in with your email address? I looked at the emails tied to the forum accounts of each of the folks here, and I don't see any recent crash reports. If you're using different email for your Creative Cloud accounts and you sent the crash reports along, please feel free to DM me and let me know what those are.

Regarding workspaces and crashes. I'm also a long-time user of AE and I've had my fair share of crashes that revolved around workspaces. Unfortunately, it was never the workspace itself, but a third-party panel that was docked. I won't name names, but there have been some consistently problematic scripts or extensions that I finally had to give up on to avoid crashes. If anyone wants to send me a full UI screenshot of their workspace, I can take a look.

We also have a new feature that lets you maintain your current workspace when opening projects. I'd be curious if after enabling this option, if the crashes or hangs stop.

All that said, none of this solves the root of the problem—you're still not able to open some projects without crashes or hangs. If anyone is willing to send me a project that consistently hangs or crashes, we can take a look and find the root cause. 

Thanks,
- David, After Effects Engineering Team

About half of my older projects open, some hang around 99%. It's been doing this for me for a few versions. If Premiere is the root, I'll just uninstall it. I only ever use it to make templates for other people. Personally I use Resolve as it's a billion times better.

That said, a quick fix that has always worked in AE is to import the project into a blank project vs opening it. It's a total PITA though, but it'll get you out of a bind.

Also, I'm on macOS, so this is a universal issue.

Edit: Deleted Premiere. Still does it. Updated to 25.3.2. Still does it. I would like, for just one time in my career, to not have to deal with some super annoying bug in After Effects.

Edit 2: As I was suspecting, it has to do with what workspace a project was saved in in some manner. I don't know why or what. I know that in the past if I had a script open while I was developing and then I moved it or something it would cause AE to crash on open if that script had been open. Well, it looks like something like that is still in there because as soon as I opened AE, switched to my older layout, and then closed AE and opened a file that was hanging on open, it opened fine without issue.

Please fix this.

same here! (windows 11 i7 13700K 64ram ddr5 rtx 3080)

in AE 25.3 the projects do not open, it freezes at 99% - if you click crashes the app

the solution (remove, reboot, install older versions - reboot) worked for me.. wait for new versions to come out and keep testing...

I followed some of the suggestions here and I have resolved the issue for myself. I had to fully uninstall After Effects, Premiere, and Media Encoder. Reboot. Then install After Effects version 25.2.2, Premiere version 25.2.1, and Media Encoder version 25.2. Reboot again. I can now open existing AE project files and everything is working normal. I also confirmed that auto-update on these apps is turned off. This is the ONLY way I could get my project files to open. This is a real problem and Adobe really blew it with these latest updates. 

The problem still persists in the latest update 23.1 to AE as well.