After Effects Distribute Layers failing

Here's the weird behavior I was talking about with the "align bottom" tool. It works fine on the yellow blocks, but it goes crazy with the blue blocks.

AE Bug 2 - YouTube

And of course, it came right back.

Here's a video of the bug in action.

In the video, I use the align tools on a group of yellow blocks just fine. Then I click on the problematic blue blocks, and it doesn't work at all. The background layers were locked, so those shouldn't be affecting anything. To explain the weird shape of the selection box of the flat '100s blocks' to the left, they are, for animation reasons, actually a 10s block that I used a repeater to shape it into a 100 block.

AE Bug - YouTube

I would, but it randomly started working again. I started re-creating the elements in my composition, but manually copy/psted the numbers for the various properties. Those layers worked fine though the old ones didn't. However, once I deleted *some* of the old layers, they all started working fine. I don't know why that'd happen, but I get the sense that it was a bug.

The exact workflow I did was this: I took layers from a composition where they had parents, copy/pasted them into a new one where they had no parent (I tried both with and without explicitly setting parent to "none"), got rid of all of the keyframes, edited their lengths to match the new comp length, and started trying to do position animation with them. Though I could move them normally, I got the weird alignment bugs as I described earlier.

Thank you for your help, Mo; I don't know exactly how to recreate this as those are the only steps I can think of to do over, but at least it's working now. I'll post again if it returns.

Hi Derrick

First step reset preferences

Reset After Effects Preferences

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS) while the application is starting.
2. A dialog box launches asking you if you want to delete your preferences file. Click OK.
3. To also restore default keyboard shortcuts, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the OK button.