After Effects fails to launch, crashes on startup after mediacore

Thank you for your patience David, it worked! That's been on there forever, but it chose that moment to interfere.

Logging turned on.

Oh wow, that is something! I mean, Enabling Logging and restarting AE, then getting the problem to happen again is probably the best outcome here. I got your sentry report and I can send it to some folks to see if it's helpful. It's possible the report just isn't getting uploaded to our system, but the local folder you sent is what should have gotten uploaded.

And race conditions are always possible, and of course, incredibly tricky to track down. I know this is happening on two different machines, but my gut says something is causing a conflict other than an app update.

As for a completely clean install, the CC Cleaner tool has worked for me every time over the years when other methods didn't, even if it does leave files behind.

One other troubleshooting method I like to try is a brand new user account with no extra apps. Create a test account, launch AE, then see if it crashes. If it does, it could point to something system-wide.

-David, After Effects Engineering Team 

It just loaded! Some kind of race condition then? Is there anything we would like to do while it's open? I can enable logging, but it's activated on restart which is pretty rare. System compatibility says no conflicts. GPU workload seems normal in task manager.

It says the location of logs is \Users\<me>\AppData\Local\Temp\Adobe\After Effects\25.0\ There is no text log file there, but it wrote a folder there named SentryIO-db. There are a few files and subfolders there. There is last_crash file which is sadly empty 0 bytes but is correctly timestamped with last crash, as is the whole folder. There is a DMP file in there containing moonspeak which is about 6 MB. I have DM'd the SentryIO-db folder to you. I don't know if this is of any use, but it's something. Enjoy! And thank you. I'll keep AfterFX open if I can.

Thank you David, I'll give it a try this morning. If this doesn't work what do you think about trying a very thorough uninstall? It seems Creative Cloud cleaner tool leaves the directory structure and AppData, User\Documents etc, probably stuff in the registry, and after total cleaning and re-install it still asks me if I wish to migrate old settings, and it knows it's recovering from a crash on the other side of being uninstalled. Is there a way to start fresh? I might want a procedure for the right way to really clean that stuff out. Anyway, I'll try an old driver, though my point is it was old drivers on both machines at the time this happened, .

Sad about the logs. If I can ever get it to load I'll try to enable it in the help menu.

I did just see them, but unfortunately, those aren't AE or Premiere logs and don't contain any informationr elated to the crash. Understood about the driver, but I do think it's worth trying maybe the last Studio driver just in case the driver itself got corrupted, is having problems, or something else I'm not aware of.

When a new driver is installed, a lot of things change. Shaders get recompiled, GPU "stuff" (vague, I know, but I couldn't give you specifics) gets rebuilt, and problems can be solved.

I'm suggesting this as a troubleshooting method (along with a machine restart after) simply beacause you're in such a bind, and I want to try anything that can get you up and running again.

- David, After Effects Engineering Team

I only updated the nvidia driver on one of the affected machines, win 11, and only after this problem arose, not before. This did not happen right after a driver update. I have only used studio driver and do not play games. The other machine is win 10 and I have done nothing but uninstall/reinstall of CC and all apps.

Did you receive the two logs I DM'ed to you?

I'm really sorry to hear everything is turning into a disaster. For something this catastrophic to affect multiple applications on multiple machines, I would guess the GPU driver could be at fault here. I should have asked this earlier, but you said you were running "the latest Nvidia driver." Which one exactly, and is it the Game Ready or Studio driver? We recommend the Studio driver when running Adobe apps. If you do have the latest Studio driver, then I would try rolling back to the last version. I know a new Game Ready driver was just released a few days ago (actually, I think it was the same day you originally posted).

Thanks,
- David, After Effects Engineering Team

I uninstalled all adobe apps and CC from the windows 10 machine, reinstalled with the same results. Log files were not generated to the logs folder. I also tried version 24.0. Attached are some on screen CUDA errors that were kicked out. What would suddenly make two otherwise stable systems start crashing on GPU issues? Just to be clear, AEX, PPro and ME all went belly up on all my computers at the same time in the same way after last update. I can't open any of these programs.

Because it's failing to load it offers me the chance to try safe mode, reset preferences, manage plugins or continue each time a try to run. I have tried all of these options many times, as well as run as administrator. I have tried control alt shift at your request but it doesn't load a dialogue box.

I am DMing you a link to the logs, one for After Effects and one for PPro. I think when it crashes it's supposed to write one whether or not logging is turned on. I always enter my email but it seldom writes one to the logs folder in AppData. Crash Report just closes and I guess can't send anything. Not being able to write a log seemed at first to maybe be a permissions thing, but permissions look OK and it will write a log occasionally, but never to the 25.4 folder, just in the folder above.

It looks like the windows 10 box which has the same problem can't write crash logs either. The only thing these machines have in common is my account and having run the latest Adobe updates.