I can't reproduce that, so I need more information which may help me knowing what's wrong.
What are you doing when you place the rpe file? Are you only reloading? Are you restarting renpy? Does this happen when you remove the rpe and only reload renpy without restarting renpy?
Do you have any code that tries to do something with layers which runs before init -5?
Do you have a non-updated version of ActionEditor3 (it had a bug which caused issues).
If you can send me a simplified version of the VN which also fails, that works too (you can replace all images with the same image as placeholder, if you prefer)