I expected to spend my three-day MLK weekend knocking out long-overdue projects around the house, but instead, I lost an entire day that I’ll never get back to troubleshooting an issue on my daughter’s Windows 10 laptop where Adobe After Effects suddenly stopped loading after running perfectly for weeks.
The cause wasn’t faulty hardware, her installing too many apps, a plugin conflict, or (surprisingly) even Adobe. The real culprit turned out to be a bad Windows 10 update: KB5073724. Uninstalling it immediately fixed the problem.
Through its symptoms, the laptop was offering me a major clue that I accepted way too late. After Effects would freeze during startup, displaying messages like “Scanning files” or “Scanning folder: File Formats”. The system would lock up to the point that Windows couldn’t even restart; I had to force a power-off to shut it down. Naturally, I first blamed Adobe. I uninstalled and reinstalled the Creative Cloud apps to clear a recent CC update. I also pointed the finger at and refreshed the Nvidia GPU drivers. Then I uninstalled the “bad plugins”, and even cleaned up profile files and caches, looking for corrupted preferences.
The clue I should have picked up earlier was that the problem reproduced across multiple Windows user profiles. I created a new Windows user and the problem was slightly altered (I could now open, but, never cleanly close AE) but still there. My last-ditch effort, rolling back to a Windows restore point, did not help. After Effects would still hang and take the entire system down with it.
The a-ha moment came from a video from Clownfish TV concerning a recent Windows 11 update that was crippling NVIDIA GPU card performance on gaming computers. I put my Windows 10 install disk down for a second and reviewed the timeline. Sure enough, this Windows 10 laptop had update KB5073724 installed shortly before the issues began. After uninstalling that update and rebooting, After Effects immediately returned to normal behavior, launching cleanly and closing without crashing. Windows once again restarted properly every time. No further changes were required, except putting back all the random profiles settings and plugins I took out in my troubleshooting rampage.
Much like the OSI model, the lesson here is simple at its core but easy to forget: when an application failure is critical enough to prevent a clean system shutdown and follows you across user profiles, it’s almost never an app-level problem—even when it involves a habitual line stepper like Adobe software. Checking for recent Windows updates should be one of the first steps, if only to take note of it as you triage so you can revisit it early on in your remediation process and save yourself hours of application-level troubleshooting — and one-third of your three-day weekend! .
