Can't render with AME from After effects. Connection to dynamic link served doesn't work.

Hi. I am having a peculiar issue. My after effects (2019) is working fine, but whenever I try to render video via media encoder, it gets stuck on this screen:

and it stays there for like an eternity. Nothing happens after that and I am unable to render video via AME. If I save the AEP and try to import it directly to the AME, it doesn't work either and gets stuck on the same screen. The only way I can render via AME if I import the MOV file which was rendered from After effects directly, but that takes a lot of time.

The issue is not just with AME, or AE but none of the apps are able to connect to each other via Dynamic Link. I work on premiere pro as well and it is working fine, but it is unable to communicate with AE because of this Dynamic Link issue. Even the 2018 version apps could not connect to dynamic link and gets stuck on the same page forever.

Please suggest what should I do in this scenario.

Steps I have taken so far:

- Uninstalled and reinstalled the entire suite

- cleaned all cache etc

- disabled bit defender firewall, windows firewall

- many many times rebooted the computer

- updated all the apps

- updated GPU driver

- alternated between GPU rendering and Software rendering

Here are some stats which might help you to zero in on the issue:

OS: Windows 10 X64

Processor: i7-6700 HQ @ 2.60 Ghz

RAM: 16 GB

GPU: GeForce GTX 970M
OnBoard Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 530

AME version: 13.0.1 (build 12), AE version: 16.0.0 (build 235)

Thanks.