After Effects 24.5 not opening existing projects

Yesterday I updated from AE 24.0.3 to 25.4 and it will not open projects from just the day before. A friendly Adobe support person took control of the workstation and verified many system settings; tried importing the project into a new project; tried disabling, then removing, all plugins. It still did not work.

After about 45 minutes the support person said it might be a problem opening projects containing MXF files. Note that I am able to start a new project and import MXF files with no problem. It is only with these existing projects that AE crashes when the "Opening Selected Items" window appears.  The support person said he would accelerate the issue to the team.

Someone called me a few hours later from an unknown caller ID and I did not pick up. He left a voicemail saying he was Adobe calling me back about the problem. I called back this morning but it went to voicemail identifying it as "Adobe Sales" and no human ever picked up.

I have rolled back to 24.0.3 and everything is working as expected but am interested in resolving why 24.5 is not working for me. Any feedback from anyone experiencing this or with knowledge of a fix would be appreciated.

Windows 11 Pro, 128gb RAM, nVidia RTX 4090, Studio Driver 536.40