So, about a week ago I did a fresh install of 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate on a new PC, and subscribed to the Adobe Creative Cloud, installing After Effects CS6 and Photoshop CS6 from the Adobe Application Manager, then doing all updates (and I just checked right now at 10:35PM on July 26th, I have the latest versions of everything).
After Effects was working completely normal, then just now, I tried to import a Photoshop .psd and I got the error message:
After Effects error: Not enough memory to initialize PSL.
( 83 :: 8 )
Then After Effects crashed. So now it opens up normally, but when I try to import a .psd or open an After Effects project saved from an earlier version of After Effects (CS3 to CS5) I get the same error and a crash, every single time.
Searching the forums, I see people talking about this error when importing .psds into CS5, and they say that getting the latest updates solved the issue for them (which obviously can't help me). I'm running all legit software on a brand new computer with 32 GB of RAM which has passed all my physical stress tests so I know it's not hardware related.
The one thing I saw people suggest is to hold down Ctrl-Alt-Shift when starting the program. When I do this, Windows asks if I want to allow After Effects to make changes to the system, and when I say yes, I can import .psds and open the older AE files. When I close After Effects and reopen it without holding down the Ctrl-Alt-Shift keys, it goes right back to crashing.
Obviously the smart-*** answer is "then hold down Ctrl-Alt-Shift, dummy", and I'll do that for now, but is there any clue what the problem is?
I feel like kind of a chump because I decided to stop using my student versions of Adobe software (I haven't been a student for about four years) and pay the full price for the cloud membership and the latest creative suite, and it's full of bugs.