I have done an exhaustive search before I got to this point.
As with many other people, AE CS3 crashes on initializing Media Core.
I did everything save put a voodoo hex on Adobe to get this to work.
I finally figured out that the cuplrit to my crashing was the file "Adobe Editing Modes.xml" in the "Editing Modes" folder inside my Applications/AE/Contents/Plug-ins/MediaCore.
I went one by one and removed all the files and the one that caused the crash was the aforementioned "Adobe Editing Modes.xml".
WIth that removed, AE will finally open but at startup I now get a prompt "After Effects warning: failed to initialize Media Core".
I'm assuming AE won't run properly without this offending file.
My question ... how do i fix this issue?
I'm on a MBP. OSX 10.6.8. AE version 8.0x247.
Any help is appreciated for this noob who's trying to get into video editing.