I'm under a deadline right now, and trying to get my final render going to send off to the client for approvals today.

the project I'm working on isn't very intensive. it's a flat video and graphics sizzle reel style loop. about 2 minutes long with a music track.  most assets are either ultra large (print res) tifs of products, or video footage from previous presentations.

this sort of project shouldn't take much for my machine to render, but it's causing a ton of problems.

I'm using CC but I've also tried saving down and rendering from CS6 and I'm getting the same issues.

Basically, using MP, I click render, and the info panel says "Initializing Background Processes. This may take some time".

I'm used to that, and normal rendered sequences would do this for maybe 10 seconds before beginning renders.. 

This time however, it's getting hung up here.. taking 10 minutes or even more sometimes.. (honestly I've just canceled them when they run this long)

if they end up getting through this stage, I'm presented with an error at the end of the render stating something to the lines of "failed to load projects in background"

The weird part is, I can restart my system, open AE and render, and it usually works ok.. but any renders after that first one will get hung up and not render. as if the self-link processes aren't receiving the new info, or aren't dumping the old stuff.

Anyway around this? I uninstalled all adobe products and ran adobe cleaner and re-installed AE this morning, and it's still doing this. I currently can't get my render to start with MP on, and i sure need it on this project.

Thanks in advance, 

////Greg