After so many years, I encountered the same problem here.
The comp started having very bad noise after I installed the Video Pilot Optical Flare. I was Googling around and your post was my best chance to solve the problem.
My problem was different from yours. The color depth of my AE template was in 16 bit by default, so I thought it wasn’t the problem. At the end when I was running out of choices I tried 32 bit and it magically worked!
If anyone out there Googling the same problem. Go to File → Project Setting → Color Setting → Depth and try different value of depth.