I have tried to call adobe support and the guy Ali who I was talking to hung up on me. I am calling back to wait another 20 mins or so to see if I can actually get help... Which I have gotten in touch with him and he is definitely not helpful.
Adobe's support sucks bad. If it wasn't for such a good community these issues would never get fixed. I can't wait for a crew of individuals to make an Open Source version of After Effects so I can get better help like with Blender, Audacity, and OBS for examples.
Either way, I took a look at my 2022 prefs, and when I open the txt file there, it has a lot of info. This might be a big issue since the 2023 prefs txt file has nothing like in the image from above. Please check these files out and let me know your thoughts.


I removed everything Adobe from my computer, and restarted my pc, then reinstalled.
This was my only fix. I was just hoping to avoid that.
I am 100% sure that there was a clear issue created during the update within Creative Cloud going from After Effects 2022 to 2023. I used the update button in there. I selected to "not" migrate my prefs. I wanted to start from scratch with 2023.
Somewhere during this process there were some issues created. I only know this to be certain because several other issues arose after the update.
A complete fresh install is what was necesarry to fix the issues.
Hopefully this post can possibly help anyone else. Just remove it all, reboot, then get a fresh install.
Thanks! 🙂