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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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