After Effects Freezes on "Initializing Required Components" – Tried Everything

After Effects freezes on "Initializing Required Components" when launching.

However, if I open it immediately after starting the PC, it launches fine and works for 1–2 minutes. After that, it crashes, and any attempt to reopen it causes the freeze again — until I restart the PC.

What I’ve Already Tried:

• Fully uninstalled and reinstalled After Effects

• Tried After Effects Beta

• Completely removed and reinstalled Creative Cloud

• Reinstalled Windows from scratch

• Applied numerous technical suggestions from forums and ChatGPT, including:

  • Killing background Adobe processes

  • Deleting cache folders (like CCX Welcome)

  • Disabling the Start Screen in prefs

  • Blocking Adobe background tasks via Task Scheduler

  • Launching AE in a clean state using .bat files

  • Disabling GPU acceleration in prefs

• And more...

Why I’m Posting Here:

I’ve already talked to Adobe Support twice, and while the agents were kind, the suggestions repeated what I had already done. I don’t blame anyone, but I’m just feeling stuck.

If anyone here has experienced something similar, or knows of a fix I might have missed, I’d truly appreciate your insight.

And just being honest — I’m at the point where I’m wondering if there's a more stable alternative, because I really want to keep using After Effects, but this bug has made it incredibly difficult.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to read this.