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

[Douglas5C61]

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...

[Mylenium]

Check your event logs, security center and networking configuration. Something appears to be blocked somewhere.

Mylenium

[mikep35929273]

care to elaborate?

[dutchshane]

same issue

[beni5CA5]

same

[ludvigs54223661]

Same

[ludvigs54223661]

I updated Windows and now it works

[Todd5EED]

Same issue

[user2357938]

Same

[jongraham]

SAME!

[mariag21334020]

try to run it as administrator. 

[Dennis_Z]

Restarting the computer and reïnstalling AE didn't work. But for some reason running as administrator did work for me.

[Patrick.Cloudscape.ch]

This makes it start normally, but now i can't access my network, so thats not really a working solution

[miroklasinc]

@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!

[jongraham]

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!!!!

[David Arbor]

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.

[miroklasinc]

Hey @jongraham @David Arbor !

the hint about VPN got me thinking, and my IT guy was saying that a version of OpenVPN (2.4.7-I607-Win10)  that I got from a design studio I was working for automatically installed the driver for TAP Virtual Ethernet Adapter, and that wouldn't allow me mount another server as a network drive. My guys said that OpenVPN 2 hasn't had any support in over 2 years because of the security issues it had, so I'm now using V3 instead.

Hope that might help!!

[David Arbor]

Oh, interesting. I do have a virtual ethernet driver installed, but not the same one as you. I'll look into that the next time I run into this issue. Thanks for the heads up!

[gerald5F97]

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

[Patrick.Cloudscape.ch]

same issue

[Ender772]

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

[ArminKenedi]

same issue

[Sistannard]

Same issue

[גיא הבר]

For me updating windows did the trick perfectly

[Ender772]

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