AE crashing when opening a project (from two days ago), crashing when opening in safe mode and so on

[f83px]

Something fishy is going on with AE. Two days ago was working well, now it's trying to access files that don't exist in Windows.

Removed all scripts/plugins, launched in safe mode, reset prefs, uninstall/install - still same.

According to Claude
What WMIC.exe Was

WMIC (Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line) was a system utility that allowed programs to query Windows system information like hardware details, running processes, and system configuration. After Effects was using it to gather system information.

Why It's Missing

Microsoft started disabling WMIC by default in Windows 11 insider builds as of January 29, 2024, and plans to remove it completely from future Windows versions Microsoft

AE 25.3
Win11 Pro, 24H2, OS build 26100.4351

Processor AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D 16-Core Processor 4.30 GHz
RAM 96.0 GB (95.6 GB usable)

NVIDIA 5070Ti 16GB, Studio Driver 576.80

2TB NVME, + 4TB NVME for AE Cache

[JohnColombo]

Hi @f83px,

Thank you for reporting this issue. That last logged message is likely to be a red herring—while AE has previously utilized WMIC to read some system attributes, do so is designed to timeout gracefully if WMIC is not present.

When this crash occurs, does the Crash Reporter dialog show up? If so, please submit those crash reports with the same email as your CC account. Those reports are critical in our investigations of these issues.

It would also be helpful to see a full application log. Since After Effects is not able to launch, you can enable logging by creating a file named "After Effects Log.txt" in "C:\Users\<yourUserName>\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\After Effects\25.3\logs", which will then capture the application log when After Effects is launched.

Thank you for any further information,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[f83px · Accepted solution]

Crash Reporter dialog did show up and I sent the report as well. 

But since I was in a hurry, I asked Claude to play detective with the dump file and eventually we solved it. Turns out that the problem was the NVIDIA Studio Driver. Everything went back to normal after reinstalling and resetting driver settings. 

NVIDIA Graphics Driver Crash
Crash Type: Stack Overflow (code c00000fd)
Culprit: nvwgf2umx.dll (NVIDIA graphics driver)
Location: NVIDIA GPU driver, specifically in encoding/graphics processing functions
Your After Effects is crashing because:

NVIDIA Driver Problem - The crash is happening entirely within NVIDIA's graphics driver (nvwgf2umx.dll)
Stack Overflow - The driver got stuck in an infinite loop or recursive function call
GPU Encoding Issue - The crash occurred in NVENCODEAPI_Thunk functions (NVIDIA's hardware encoding)

For whatever reason this setting was turn on in the driver and AE did not like it.

[JohnColombo]

That's great to hear, @f83px! Glad you got it sorted.

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team