Help! After Effects freezes upon startup during the Crash Repair Options

Report · Nov 19, 2025

After Effects 25.6 decided to stop working and it is racking my brain on what happen. I have manually trashed the preferences, unistall/installed AE and all my adobe apps (including cloud), and have deleted the few plugins/extensions I do use (Artlist.io and Animation composer) and have restarted my computer.

Tried the tips in this post but none of those plugins are used on this computer.

The beach ball of death pops up during the repair options and I have to force quit the app everytime. The same happens with previous versions of AE now but AE Beta seems to work just fine.

Running on

Apple M2 Max

64 GB Memory

Tahoe 26.1

Report · Nov 20, 2025

Sorry to hear about the issue.

Try this:

Go to the following location and remove (or move to a different location to keep a backup) all the files and folders except dummy.txt and try to launch After Effects.

Location - HD/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plugins/7.0/MediaCore

There are two different libraries in Mac. This location is inside the system library. Here's how you can access the location: open Finder > click on Go in the menu bar > select Go to Folder > copy and paste "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0"

Let me know how it goes.

Thanks,
Nishu

Report · Nov 20, 2025

Thank you for the response but the issue still persist. It freezes up on the Crash Repair Options and I have to force quit the app.

Report · Nov 21, 2025

Thanks for giving it a try. I could be a permissions-related issue. Try the steps in the following article: https://adobe.ly/4oQ4iZZ

If it doesn't help, try providing full disk access to After Effects. Here's how: https://adobe.ly/3X6G2Xt

Let me know if that makes any difference.

Thanks,
Nishu

Report · Nov 25, 2025

Still no luck. I sent in another crash report if that helps at all narrowing down the problem.

Report · Nov 26, 2025

Did you provide your email id to the crash reporter? If not, please do so that we can find the crash report from your system. Please DM me the email id you provided to the crash reporter.

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks,
Nishu