After Effects CS4 crash on start-up: "Sweetpea failure"

Question

Hi folks,
this is my first post here in this forum, so I send best wishes to you all.
Here is the problem I am facing since today.
I am running CS4 Master Collection with the latest updates on my 64Bit Windows 8.1 Pro machine which is also up to date.
The hardware I am using is the following:
Intel Core i5-4670K @ 3.40 GHz
16GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX660 running driver version 335.23
Realtek Audio Card (on mainboard)
1x SSD for WIN and PROGs
1x 10000RPM HDD for footage and data
1x RAID 0 consisting of 2 HDD for working files and cache
The setup worked great. Then I installed Mocha AE 3.2.1 which worked as well fine and did not interfere with the performance of CS4.
But after installing the "mocha 3D track importer for AE 1.1.0" plugin from Imagineer Systems, After Effects did not start anymore, stopping with the statement:
"After Effects can't continue: Sweetpea failure (48 § 58)"
This is what I already tried:
deleting the mocha 3D track importer Plugin
restarting Windows
stopping Kaspersky Anti Virus
uninstalling After Effects followed by a reinstall
uninstalling whole CS4 and running the Adobe Clean Script
reinstalling CS4 in clean Windows boot
uninstalling Mocha AE 3.2.1
reinstalling Mocha AE 3.2.1
performing an extended Google and Adobe Community Search, but:
this problem seems to happen not quite often to others
the solution in this thread is not available anymore and my audio drivers are setup fine
solutions in further threads are for MAC-OS only
I am actually running out of ideas as even reinstalling all relevant software - except OS - did not solve the problem.
Does anyone in the community have an idea on that subject?
Thanks a lot for any help and
best regards,
Michael

Answer 1

Thank you Todd for your effort.
Well, I fully understand and respect that Adobe does not grant any liability for CS4 under Win8 as they made the effort to develop and introduce newer releases of their software (namely CS5, 5.5, 6 and now CC).
As with that CS4 gets a little sign at the toe saying "deprecated" - which in fact is totally legitimate because their might be no capacity to thorougly test it.
But: just by saying that it will definitely run under Vista and it is not tested for reliability on Win8, it does not mean that it won't run under Win8.
In fact: Microsoft itself grants, that this specific software will be compatible with their OS and I may assume that my previous experience and that of those many other users running the combination happily, shows that CS4 is such a great product that it does its job stable on Win8 which is not the OS it was designed for.
My practical experience on that, having used CS4 on Vista and Win 8.1 both, moreover showed that it was horribly unstable under Vista and ran absolutely stable on Win8.1 till - well, yesterday.
Back to the topic: I do cast doubt on the theory that this specific issue, I explained above, is caused by incompatibility with Win8.1, that is because:
if it was related to Win8, many other users would have reported that issue
After Effects worked fine and stable under Win8 for quite a time till yesterday
all other Applications that I use from the bundle cause no trouble at all
To find back to the starting position where all the applications worked fine, I would like to know if you might suggest any troubleshooting - except buying a new Software package.
There might an option to turn on some kind of logging to see, what AE is doing until it halts, but I actually do not know how and where - so maybe you have more information on that.
The only thing I could realize at the meanwhile is, that by the time AE throws the Exception it shows the progress message "Cleaning up... Tracker Controls" on the splash screen in the background. This might be a hint to the previously used plugin from Imagineer.
Do you have suggestions how to savely remove a plugin like that?
I thank you a lot and send
best regards,
Michael