I just had this issue last week. One laptop running windows 10 stopped running AC(v. 9.1). Normally I would setup a mapped network drive and point to that drive when AC was asking for the server folder. After reinstalling AC multiple times I would still get the same results. AC would attempt to start up but would take minutes to load (while loading it would state in the AC window "it encountered an error, would pause and reattempt to load and eventually would come up with the error you mentioned).
I finally called AC support and the problem was solved. Instead of pointing AC to the mapped drive, tech support pointed AC directly to the server on the network).
I hope this helps.

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Raj
From (mostly) sunny Port St Lucie, florida