After Effects crashing when rendering png sequence to a network

Hello,

We work via a network and have recently found a problem when rendering PNG sequences to the network. This used to work fine, the last AE update was in April and i am pretty sure i have successfully rendered PNGS to the network since then so i don't think an AE update has caused the issue. The first error that comes up is:

followed by

and finally it sometimes comes up with the following... (although sometimes its only in the render log. )

"After Effects: AEGP Plugin PNGIO Support: Unable to create PNGIO. (5027 :: 12)"

I have tried this from 3 machines, i have ruled out any plugins or source assets as i have made a New AE project and comp with nothing in it and i still get the same errors. We use After Effects 2017 and it is up to date.

We have a work around as it works through Media Encoder or we can render straight to our local machines and copy over however i find media encoder slower to render and copying the files is an added process that slows down our workflow so i would like to find a solution.

We used to have a similar issue where we could not render any .mov to our network, this was resolved in an AE update about a year ago.

Cheers in advance,