After Effects errors "unknown exceptions" and "unexpected exceptions"

[goylepower]

Hi there fellow users and Adobe experts, I am having some serious issues with After Effects today that's caused me to completely reinstall After Effects twice, wiping the folder and declining to migrate settings. The file I'm trying to edit has no special anything and is just a standard project file with images and I am mainly using CC Toner and Drop Shadow as effects, both native to AE and very common. However, I'm getting Uknown Exceptions crashes and crashes that say that I have to disable Drop Shadow and CC Toner because an Unexpected Exception has occurred. I am using the most recent version of After Effects and the project file was created in this version. I am on a Mac and using Monterey 12.4. So far as far as I can tell there's no real rhyme or reason behind the crashes. I have tried all the standard fixes, restarting, clearing all cache, etc. I'd love to hear any explanation for this problem!

[jenkmeister]

Can you share your project with us? 

Any chance you're receiving the "Crash report" dialog and are sending in the crash reports? If not, can you?

[goylepower]

I didn't get a crash report on my last crash, but I will send them in when I get them. I can't share it unfortunately because it's under an NDA.  What sort of information would be helpful for me to give as far as the project goes?

[jenkmeister]

Can you send it without footage?

If not, we'd need literal step by step instructions that reliably reproduces the problem so we can attempt to reproduce it at our end. There have only been 2 reports of Drop Shadow crashing in 23.4 in the past 4 weeks, both on Windows, and none with CC Toner reported. So I'm thinking it is something else causing those effects to fail but without a project or steps, I'm not sure where to help.

[goylepower]

@jenkmeister I will try to get something together to send to you. Currently, I just checked my Activity Monitor and there's a program called CEPHtmlEngine Helper that's using 100% of my CPU apparently is attached to my Adobe files within AE. 

[jenkmeister]

That is used by a few things in AE, but also be any third-party panels installed into AE. Do you have any of those installed in AE? 

[goylepower · Accepted solution]

I've uninstalled everything except one thing. It seems to be okay so maybe there was something old in there that was screwing everything up. I will test out which one it is at a later date - thanks for your help.