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.

Jedi Mind Trick: Add a Console Log to AE

Everyone suffers from Jedi Mind Tricks by our favorite apps. Here's a video tip (from Premiere Pro User Group's Blip.tv) on how you can add a Console Log to see what After Effects is doing under the hood (put an empty text file called After Effects Log.txt in your preference folder, a tab will appear in AE when next launched):

Beyond curiosity, the Console Log may help in troubleshooting -- which was noted earlier by Jonas Hummelstrand at the end of his Troubleshooting After Effects (all versions). And Lutz Albrecht has already investigated many of the possible errors and provides a 30-page list of After Effects error codes with possible solutions in his Mylenium Error Code Database. Some of the entries reflect tech notes at Adobe, but it's nice to have the errors listed in one place.

Mylenium adds AE error code knowledge base

Mylenium has updated his website, Voir. It which includes projects and presets under a Creative Commons license, and a new After Effects error code knowledge base. His blog, Mylenium’s World, is still there too.