AE crashes on startup

So, I'm trying to figure out if there's something on my end I can do to get AE to load consistently.  It keeps crashing on startup during the "cleaning up" phase; usually when it's "cleaning up" smartmask interpolation but occasionally on cleanup for other things.  I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling without luck.  I've tried trashing preferences, but the program crashes during startup, so I can't do the ctrl+alt+shift method.   AE will occasionally open properly, but it's like playing roulette. 

Any ideas how to fix this?  I've done forum and google searches and didn't see any posts regarding this, so apparently it must be fairly isolated.  I'm on the Adobe After Effect CS6 and did not have this issue with CS6 before.

Thanks