Premiere and Media Encoder - Fails to open, freezes on splash screen loading AEXD.aex

Hi everyone,

I have been having this problem since morning (12/11/2020). So, I went on a hunt for a viable solution.

After many trials, uninstalling Premiere, searching for an elusive %Appdata% folder, and almost giving a thought of starting afresh my computer, I found one solution that led me to the finding I will share in this thread. The solution has to do with the idea of creating another user account.
 
After my analysis, it seems like this is a Windows 10 sort of a problem.

Another similarity is that the culprit is Adobe Premiere or Adobe Media Encoder hugging or cruising at the final stage of the loading AEXD.aex or importerquicktime.prm plugins. 

This is the same problem I encounter with my Camtasia. However, Camtasia resolved it by suggesting a new location. That went on smoothly. I didn’t even think there is a huge problem lying beneath.

So, to fix this, once I was in the second user account, I noticed when load Premiere Pro, I got this notification from my Windows 10 defender, to allow Premiere Pro to have access to My Document.

It is obvious by default, this folder is accessible to these apps, right?

However, with the revamped Windows Security, the Ransomware protection is super active to watch which apps access certain paths in your computer.

So, with these two plugins in need to access the Adobe folder in my Documents (I hope that’s the case here), the windows defender sees it as a threat. As a result, it prevents them from accessing the folder.

This is the reason Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder are the two most affected apps from the creative suite. That is, for Windows 10 users who are using Windows security as their default antivirus.

So, the fix...

You have 2 options here:

Option 1:

1. Open your Windows 10 Security App (Windows Defender for win 10)
2. Click Virus & threat protection 
3. Click on Protection history (Wait a little bit to load the history)
4.  Toggle the histories from "Protected folder access blocked" - you will require administration rights here.
5. Click on Actions Button and select Allow on device.

Option 2:

1. Open your Windows 10 Security App (Windows Defender for win 10)
2. Click Virus & threat protection 
3. Click on Ransomware Protection 
4. Then, on Manage ransomware protection.
5. Next, on Block History
6. Toggle the histories from "Protected folder access blocked" - you will require administration rights here.
7. Click on Actions Button and select Allow on device.

One thing to note, you cannot remove the Documents path from the list of protected folders.

I hope you find this useful. 

Posting a follow-up here after a troubleshooting session with a customer. They were unable to launch Premiere Pro 14.5, hang on AEXD.aex, and were crashing in After Effects 17.5. AE crash report pointed to a problem with the AMD GPU driver. The system was running a 2019 Dell driver, which was reported as the latest available. We installed updated drivers for their chipset directly from AMD and the issue went away. No more AE crash and Premiere proceeded past the AEXD.aex stage and launched fully. 
If you encounter this hang, please try updating drivers directly from the chip manufacturer's site. 

If there are no newer drivers for your GPU, and you encounter this after updating Premiere, you can downgrade by using the Other versions menu item under the 3-dot menu next to Premiere in the Creative Cloud app. 

Update: Downgrading to versiob 14.3 worked. Why is this the case?!