About the weird bug where Ae starts with an unsaved project (.aep)

Question

For the past month or so, I’ve been losing my mind over a bug where After Effects launches with an unsaved project

After some desperate debugging, I found out that deleting UserWorkspace.xml from this path fixes it (at least temporarily):

C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\[version]\ModifiedWorkspaces-J

⚠️ Heads up: this will reset all your workspaces. So before you nuke the file, grab screenshots or use a screen ruler to note down your layout

As someone who carefully crafted a workspace pixel by pixel, this feels like mourning a lost pet

RIP, custom workspace 💀

Adobe, please—fix this for everyone else before they go through the same heartbreak.

nishu_kush · Answer

Thanks for creating this post, YuU7122.

While the product team is always working on improving the app, sometimes the app preferences (custom workspaces are part of preferences) get corrupted, which can cause issues like the one you had. Resetting/clearing the preferences is part of basic troubleshooting. If you face any issue and suspect it could be the corrupted preferences, you can launch After Effects in Safe Mode. It'll launch After Effects with fresh preferences for that particular launch.

Hope it helps. Moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions.

Thanks,
Nishu

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