After Effects error: "strange situation"

@jcburns is reporting his favorite Adobe After Effects error:

This one can't be found at Mylenium's Error Code Database, though a similar one was reported by Alan Shisko. There's a few more screenshots of error messages at the Mograph Wiki. For fun see Crash report love letters.

Todd Kopriva has a tip if you want to dig deeper: "Search for the word ‘error’ plus the error code surrounded by double quotation marks, like this search for the error code 7 :: 66. Implicit in this tip is that you should be using the After Effects Community Help search to do your search." If you're really into Jedi mind tricks you can add a Console Log to AE.

More generally and in the past at least, Troubleshooting After Effects (all versions) at General Specialist was handy. See also the previous entry What do to when AE crashes, which was really relaying a request for using the Crash Reporter, which you wouldn't see with error dialogs but only if AE crashes.