AE CS3 crashes when setting audio format options for MP3

Question

I've just submitted a bug report, but I wanted to see if anyone experienced this or have any suggestion.
Basically, when I add an MP3 audio to a comp, and trying to make a movie (exporting it as uncompressed QT), when I press the Format Options button under the audio options output, AE will crash.
Here are the steps.
1. Add an MP3 file to the project.
2. Create a comp with only the MP3 file in it. You can also create other objects/elements in the comp as long as there's an MP3 audio file.
3. Add the comp to the render queue (aka Make Movie)
4. Under the Output Module settings, select "QuickTime video" for output. The "Format Options" for the QT movie is not important at this point, but you can select uncompressed animation.
5. Check "Audio Output". Click the "Format Options" button under the Audio Output.
6. After Effects CS3 will vanish from the screen without saying "Hi, how are you!"
WinXP SP3 32bit / 4G
After Effects CS3 8.0.2.27 dva:2.0.0.127845
Anyone getting this and knows why is this happening? Tried different MP3 files with the same results.
Thanks

Answer 1

Thanks for reporting this. Adding repro steps is always very valuable (though I suspect that step 5 is all it takes!)
I think the nature of the source MP3 file(s) is probably irrelevant, since (if I understand correctly) the crash occurs when pressing the Audio Format Options button in the Output Module, not when previewing or rendering.
There was a similar report from another user. It looks like a problem with Quicktime on Windows, or at leasr some flavors of Windows.
Of course no combination of settings should make the application crash, but the odd thing that also struck me in the earlier report is... that by specifying MP3 for audio encoding on an Lossless (ie, Animation-encoded) Quicktime file, you're saving about 0.05 per cent in the overall file size/data rate To put it in perspective, you're making the audio go from 175 Kbytes per second to 30 Kbytes/s, on a file that easily can have a data rate of 20 Megabytes per second!