Thought I'd post this for anyoen who might have the same problem I had. I'm not sure how it is in WIndows, but in MacOS, if you have your fonts installed from an external hard drive, and you unplug that drive, After Effects isn't smart enough to know what's going on. It just defaults to "After Effects Warning: Unknow Exception", and won't launch. For those wondering why I'd store my fonts on a secondary drive, those of us with giant font libraries, using font managers, it's quite common to store our fonts on a different drive than the OS. Also, using font management helps declutter the OS.
Anyway, if you find that you are getting this error, and After Effects won't start up, check your fonts. 🙂
AdChoices