Firmware didn’t do anything.
BUT I had an idea to take my hard drive and try it out on my previous computer with very little things installed.
The project opened correctly, but was missing lots of effects from plug-ins. So, I installed them back onto this machine one by one. To realize that all my trapcode plug-ins were making AE7 crash on this project. YET, I had previously upgraded them from the website. PLUS a new bug occured, I had to remove Eye Candy too as it cannot load the project either… And I mean, Eye Candy is an age old plug-in that has work on just about anything since 1999, and which I never had a problem with until this day.
So now, all of what was working before just started going down gradually up until this point where not only those Trapcode are not working, but Eye Candy too ( I only had the “glow” effects in this one (well, on lots of different layers, still, it shouldn’t change anyhting).
I even tried downgrading back to my old version, but NOW there’s a new error message:
“3D stroke” has global outflags2 and PIPL flags are 7.
Thank god this is SO understandable… I did found one post with the same error message, but unfortunately no additional info on how to correct it. Thread can be found here: https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=2&postid=855955
—>Then decided to still, reinstall the newest 3D stroke, and open a new project to try it out. And guess what… It worked.
So a deduction at this point is that the Trapcode plug-ins and Eye Candy plug-ins have decided “slowly” to crash it out because they don’t like “something” in my project… Could be a combination of plug-ins together, but how am I supposed to know which???? I got a bunch of them and they all were working fine before! Plus they are all used in so many comps…
The worst is that they are used in a very traditional fashion, i.e. without crazy expressions and whatnot.
It’s been a full 3 days trying to get out of this nightmare… Any insight ANYONE???