After Effects - won't save, won't import

Sometimes, when working in after effects for a while, all of a sudden the import and save functions simply stop working. Auto-save would help, but not if you're working on something you haven't saved yet yourself. Extremely frustrating since I can't see any other way than quitting AE with no way of saving my work and having to start all over - which can be extremely upsetting.

I know - save your work as you start it so that auto-save saves you.. this souldn't be on me though. You guys need to introduce the ability of saving a .aep file through media encoder or enable a secondary auto-save function that works with unsaved files. I don't even care about the bug that much - programs can malfunction... just give me some redundancy that allow me to not start from scratch.

I would use bad words in this thread if I could.