We did an install of Active Transfer 9.6, Fix 23 and for any Active Transfer component, such as, VFS, users, Server Instance, events, we get the error message of:
8888:ActiveTransfer is not initialized. Could not fetch db details from the alias:ActiveTransferConnection
Check the Readme file for MFT. After installing the fix, you have to run the DB Configurator and migrate the database version of Active Transfer version to 31. Once you do this, you should not see this issue again.