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Douglas5C61
Participant
October 30, 2020
Question

After Effects won't start, stuck on "Cleaning Up"

  • October 30, 2020
  • 25 replies
  • 21397 views

I was using AE just fine yesterday, turned off my computer last night and there was a cumulative Windows update. Booted today and I cannot get AE to load. 2020 or 2019, tried clearing the prefs, updating AE, reinstalling and even system restore to before the update last night. It keeps hanging on the "Cleaning Up" part when it loads, sometimes it hangs on cleaning up "Anywhere" sometimes "AEDynamicLinkServer".

 

Need some help ASAP...

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    25 replies

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    Patrick.Cloudscape.ch
    Participant
    August 18, 2021

    Just realized today, it somehow got resolved... don't know what did the trick though, could have been a windows update or After Effects update...

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    pedro.pereira1992
    Participant
    August 16, 2021

    I was having this problem too. The computer that I'm using is from my work. I was able to solve this problem after connecting to my work's VPN, apparently it has something to do with this.

      M
      mikep35929273
      Known Participant
      August 16, 2021

      Thanks @pedro.pereira1992 it worked! I connected to our VPN and AE opened quickly. Normally it would take 15-20 minutes to open, same with Premiere and AME.

       

      @pedro.pereira1992 Further to this, I chatted with a freelancer we work with. His explanation was that it's because of the mapped network drives. You have to type out the IP address in the explorer search bar and then make a shortcut of the server in quick access. Then disconnect the mapped drive. I tried it, now AE opens quickly without having to connect to the server.

       

      What an annoying glitch!

      C
      christianm23798044
      Participant
      August 4, 2021

      Having the same problem, after everything working perfectly fine yesterday...

      R
      richardg30434111
      Known Participant
      August 4, 2021

      Running in administrator mode will let you work but take away your ability to drag import files...so not too bad.  Christian see you later

      ג
      גיא הבר
      Participant
      July 22, 2021

      For me updating windows did the trick perfectly

       

      R
      richardg30434111
      Known Participant
      July 22, 2021

      Oh yeah...just wait til next time you shut down

      S
      Sistannard
      Participant
      July 21, 2021

      Same issue

      ArminKenedi
      ArminKenedi
      Inspiring
      June 24, 2021

      same issue

      R
      richardg30434111
      Known Participant
      June 21, 2021

      Geez man...i uninstall and reinstall every week to fix this problem...ADOBE GET YOUR SHIP TOGETHER

        P
        Patrick.Cloudscape.ch
        Participant
        June 3, 2021

        same issue

        G
        gerald5F97
        Participant
        April 10, 2021

        Same issue over here. Been using AE CS6 for years with no issues and as soon as I upgraded to Creative Cloud, it's nothing but issues. Anyone have a quick fix without having to create a separate user account? This is garbage

        miroklasinc
        miroklasinc
        Participant
        April 7, 2021

        @Douglas5C61 were you able to figure out what caused it, and how to fix it respectively? Same thing happened to me yesterday, out of the blue AE got slow and when I restarted it got stuck at Cleaning Up... temp workaround is to create a new user account on your workstation, that did the trick for me, at least for now. But it would be great to solve this issue, all my settings are gone!

        J
        jongraham
        Participant
        April 8, 2021

        I wrestled for two days. Lost Premiere and AE. The only thing that worked was to create a completely new PC user.  Started right up. I tried every hack I could find on every forum to no avail.  Adobe needs to solve this!!!!

        D
        David Arbor
        Inspiring
        April 8, 2021

        I started seeing this a few weeks ago, but only when I was already connected to my work VPN. When I disconnected, AE launched fine. After that, reconnecting to the VPN still made AE hang, but it eventually got through the "cleaning up" step on its own after several minutes, then subsequent launches went fine.

         

        @jongraham Have you filed a bug on UserVoice? If not, then the After Effects team won't know about this issue. This is a user-to-user forum, and while Adobe employees do occasionally pop in here, the best way to notify the dev team of issues is by filing a bug. People think if they and a handful of others are experiencing an issue that the AE team should clearly have run across it in their testing, but with 30-year-old software running on millions of different setups, that's not nearly as likely as people think.

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