After Effects unusable after restart prior to color management settings change

Hi,

After Effects seems to break my project files.

Expected behavior:

I open a project and the first preview frame renders.

Actual B behavior:

under certain circumstances After Effects doesn't render any preview frames after opening a project (the preview area just becomes grey). I can scroll through the timeline, change effect settings etc. but no frames are rendered and the program has 0% CPU usage. It crashes on exit.

This behavior can be reproduced this way (I can only reproduce it using BorisFX Sapphire plugins, but I suspect it's an AE issue):

See attachments for demonstration.

1. Launch After Effects

2. Configure Project Settings -> Color like this:

(3. Restart After Effects)

4. Create a new composition with 3 layers: 2 solids, 1 adjustment layer above them

5. Put S_DistortRGB onto the adjustment layer and set "Lens" and "Matte from Layer" to the layer directly below the adj. layer. Change both from "Source" to "Effects & Masks".

6. Put e.g. Fractal Noise on the layer that is used by "Lens" and "Matte from Layer", hide the layer

7. Put a shape layer with a rectangle (or an image) below the adjustment layer.

8. Save the project, restart After Effects and open the project

9. Set "Linearize working color space" in Project Settings -> Color to false

10. Save the project, restart After Effects and reopen the project

As a result, I can't work on some of my old projects (I might have changed the Color settings somewhere along the way which triggered the described behavior).

If I reopen the project after it has been "corrupted", disable AE's GPU Acceleration and restart AE again, AE does render frames again, but it is significantly slower.

I already tried to...

...update / reinstall GPU drivers

...switch between Studio / Game Ready driver

...reinstall (other versions of) After Effects

...reinstall (other versions of) Sapphire Plugins

...reinstall Windows

...reset AE preferences

I was able to reproduce the bug using following software versions:
After Effects 24.4.1 (Build 2)

BorisFX Sapphire 2024.51

Windows 11 23H2

NVIDIA Studio Driver 555.99

Hardware:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

RAM: 64GB (52GB assigned to AE)

Does anyone have an idea on how to solve this issue?