After Effects 25.4 crashes on startup

Maybe it makes sense to just use the same version libraries in After Effects and Camera Raw? The crash is caused by a conflict between these applications! I don't think it's hard for Adobe developers to do this...

I think both of you are making fair points here.

It’s true that DevOverrideEnable is a legitimate Windows feature - it was even enabled by default in older versions of Windows and still serves a purpose for developers who need DLL redirection in debugging scenarios. Nobody’s questioning that you might be using it for reasons that have nothing to do with Adobe.

Where the disconnect comes in is around support boundaries. After Effects, like most commercial apps, is only built and tested against default Windows behavior. Once DevOverrideEnable is switched on, it changes the way DLLs are resolved system-wide, and in this case it forces AE to pull in a different onnxruntime.dll version than the one that matches its own Microsoft.AI.MachineLearning.dll. That mismatch is what’s triggering the crash.

From Adobe’s perspective, the official line will always be:
They can’t guarantee stability when global override/debug keys are active.
Support is scoped to standard Windows configurations.
If you do need that key enabled for other work, the safest workaround is either disabling it temporarily when running AE or isolating AE in a separate environment where the override isn’t present.

There’s also the unfortunate reality that the same registry override is often seen in cracked or modified builds. In those cases, users aren’t going to be able to rely on Adobe support, and the workaround would have to be different - usually installing in a way that avoids pulling in the mismatched DLLs at all, rather than expecting Adobe to adapt their own code to support a tampered environment.

For Adobe to fully support DevOverrideEnable, they’d effectively need to redesign their loading logic so After Effects could handle multiple runtime versions gracefully. That’s a big engineering change, and it’s unlikely they’d prioritize it given that this registry key isn’t part of their supported configurations.

So it’s not really about assuming bad intent - it’s just that Adobe has to draw the line at what they can reasonably test and guarantee.

This registry key is a documented function of the operating system. It can be used by software developers to debug various programs. Up to and including Windows 8, this parameter was enabled by default. You are fixated on hacking Adobe and do not even think that this tool can be used by me for other purposes, and for other software in general. Alas, this function is indiscriminate. When enabled, it affects all software in the OS. But, as I already said, this is a documented function of the OS! And Adobe developers MUST provide for the possibility of using this registry key by end users.

This is not an Adobe issue.

The `DevOverrideEnable` flag under `HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options` is not something Adobe sets or requires for any Creative Cloud apps. It’s a Windows developer/testing override switch.

A genuine Adobe installation will never create this registry value. In practice, the only times it shows up are when:

• A Windows developer explicitly enables it for low-level debugging (extremely rare in an Adobe context), or
• It’s added by third-party patchers such as GenP or repacks like Monkrus, which manipulate the registry and WinTrust to bypass Adobe licensing.

When this flag is present, After Effects may load the wrong `onnxruntime.dll` version, which leads to the crash.

With a clean, genuine installation (no override), Adobe apps load the correct DLL and run normally.

If `DevOverrideEnable` is set on a system running After Effects, it is almost always a sign of a non-genuine installation, not an Adobe bug.