"After Effects can't continue: sorry, After Effects has crashed [...] (0 :: 42)" error message

Question

Hey all.
I've recently been getting the aforementioned error message, and from what I've gathered from my reading into the problem it's probably the most generic AE error message there is. Fun. If it makes a difference, it always appears when AE is initializing the User Interface. I haven't tried all the other programs yet, but Photoshop CS2 seems to load up without a problem, as does Premiere Pro 2.0.
I'm running AE 7.0 as part of the Creative Suite Production Studio Premium (Student Edition), 2GB of RAM, and am running on a Gateway MX6640b (?) laptop. And I'm not that knowledgeable when it comes to the technical side of computers, so my apologies if I haven't listed all the relevant specs of my laptop.
I haven't been able to pinpoint what may have caused this problem (I guess that's pretty evident), but I've tried a ton of stuff to try and get it sorted. I've ran multiple disk checks (which have thrown up a bunch of unreadable files, all of which have now been fixed. Though it seems to always find another bad file cluster each time I run it), defragged the hard drive, updated my video drivers, reinstalled AE7 as well as uninstalling and installing it, installed the AE Render Engine, ran the Adobe Updater, and uninstalled and installed the entire Creative Suite. I haven't installed any new fonts since I last used it (I've read that incompatible fonts may cause this error message). And now I'm at a real loss about what to do.
Incidentally, by running the "Install After Effects Render Engine" program, it actually threw up more error messages when AE was starting up than before despite the fact that it claims to fix bugs / corrupt files etc. For some reason it couldn't find any of the palettes (Audio, Tool, and the like) - but I sorted that out when I uninstalled and reinstalled AE.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can run AE without OpenGL capable hardware, so that shouldn't be the cause of your problems. It's probably either a corrupt preference file or QuickTime installation.
Try these tips and report back:
i http://generalspecialist.com/2007/02/troubleshooting-after-effects-7.asp
The "Render Engine" is a version of AE that can be used on unmanaged machines that collaboratively render a project over a network. That's why it doesn't have all the options. It can't be used for anything other than rendering.
Make sure you enable "Show hidden files/folders" in Windows XP's view preferences. See my blog post for other ways of deleting the preferences.
- Jonas Hummelstrand
http://generalspecialist.com/