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...

[christianm23798044]

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

[richardg30434111]

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

[pedro.pereira1992]

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.

[mikep35929273]

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!

[Patrick.Cloudscape.ch]

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...

[Haris5CCF]

Having the same problem, just try to disconnect any mapped network drive in your Windows Explorer, worked for me

[Aalex24282702fa53]

I wrote in another answer to stop Google Drive but I guess your answer is more generic.

[wilyfox]

I had the same issue where After Effects 2021 kept hanging for 5-10 minutes every time I started it and the message "Cleaning up" and "Anywhere" was being displayed. After trying a bunch of things, e.g. changing cache, running as admin, re-installing video drivers, updating the OS and so on, what worked for me was to turn off VPN. As soon as I turned off VPN, After Effects loaded relatively much faster,  I think in less than a minute instead of the usual 5-10 minutes with the VPN on. So I am speculating that After Effects reaches out to some servers during start up and perhaps the VPN is causing some sort of interruption in this process. As some VPN clients support split tunneling, if I knew what servers After Effects hits during start up, I can add the domains to split tunneling so that I can still run VPN for the rest of my apps, but just not for After Effects.

Hopefully this helps someone else who is stuck on this rather frustrating issue that was really putting a crimp in my workflow.

[edmundearle]

Tried a few things and have it working now:

1. Ran as administrator. this at least got the program to open successfully. It did disconnect my network drives though...

2. While AE was open I purged all the memory/disk cache.

3. Disabled and enabled the network adapter

4. Restarted the computer... made sure my network drives were back.

5. Opened AE normally and it seems to work

6... I also tried opening through Creative Cloud, rather than a desktop shortcut- this may help as well?

[filips97187540]

Jesus, Disabled and enabled the network adapter, helped me this time. Incredible. Thx! I already run it as and admin and did all the other "tricks". 

[mikep35929273]

It only happens to me when I'm not connected to my work's VPN. I have a bunch of servers docked in the left panel (Windows 11) so if I don't connect to the VPN, After Effects hangs for a long time on launch, probably because it's trying to search those drives. I wish Adobe would fix this, doesn't happen with any other apps.

[filips97187540]

I'm not on the VPN, and I don't have any more network connections than yesterday when it worked normally.
What was different from yesterday was windows 10 update.

[Audrey_M]

Run as admin. Work for me.

[AlexKuo]

Some issue happened in CC2022.....

I have to reinstall CC  again and again....

[Aalex24282702fa53]

Stopping Google Drive (which had some backup sync) worked for me.

[paulw8988830]

Same issue, on a Mac. WTF?

[jaydude-wb]

Same here for Ae23 Mac. Hanging on splash screen "Cleaning up" "Anywhere".

Unfortunately, I am not able to give the exact build, because this is not displayed on the splash screen.

Hope this wil be solved quickly, for Premiere Pro, it took years to get it back to function normally.

[omlet29167000gpk1]

I was having the same issue after install 'Animation Composer 3' plug in. Uninstalled the plugin but the problem persisted.
Searched on the computer for all the folders that the typical uninstall process didn't remove (dummy files, etc).
Done!
I believe this has to do with plugins that require cloud access, like this one.

Hope it helps!