Yesterday Houdini was running just fine as usual!
Then this morning, it stopped opening. I can launch it from the Launcher (aptly named). I get the splash screen and it seems to load but then an empty Houdini Console pops up and everything just freezes.
I don't understand why it was working just fine yesterday?
Pulled the crash log and there's a line just below the time stamp that says "Caught signal 11."
The rest of it just looks like usual stuff?
Earlier today I could uninstall and reinstall and get it to run once. That's not working now either.
I've tried a few different production builds of 20.5 and get the same results. Even tried a version of 20 with no luck.
Maybe there's something useful in there above my pay grade?
Any advice appreciated, thank you!
Houdini 20.5.XX Freezes at Startup?
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- The3DStig
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- ronald_a
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- GnomeToys
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I got one of these (very similar anyway and on Windows, which doesn't use Signals to indicate segfaults and the stack trace was mostly Qt stuff) the other day trying to launch help with F1, but it was just Houdini saying that it caught the signal 11 then crashing to desktop when I closed the log window with nothing in the Windows event log since it didn't rethrow it even though it obviously couldn't recover.
There's almost never a reason to reinstall modern Windows (by which I mean dating back to NT 4.0)... I've needed to do it roughly twice outside of catastrophic hardware failures and one was because I was intentionally trying to break my install. The other was related to having C:\Users junctioned to a different drive because of the increasingly enormous amount of space 3rd party software wastes in AppData vs. the size of SSD available at the time. This would have been grade had the target of the junction not decided to suffer from disk failure. I consider that one my fault since that setup is considered a bad move in the first place and I knew it but I was getting tired of Adobe CC generating its usual daily 10GB of logs on the OS drive regardless of where I pointed %TEMP% among other things so I junctioned that and Users instead.
Removing the loopback adapter was a great way to do it a long time ago but this isn't possible through normal means anymore AFAIK.
Corrupting the boot stores badly enough that the system will no longer start from the OS drive obviously works but this won't happen outside of a hardware failure or some heavy intentional screwing around just like the other item and won't cause this, and it can be fixed from a recovery disk / thumb drive kinda easily and isn't your issue.
If GDI32 is segfaulting there's probably something wrong with the video drivers or how Qt is calling the GDI APIs, which isn't difficult to screw up since it uses the older message-passing interfaces rather than direction function calls. Something leaking vram might be enough to cause a segfault, the caller is supposed to do checking for enough memory to create a surface / etc. I'd suggest rolling back to the previous version of the video drivers since NVidia and AMD both recently updated them within the past week, updating the video drivers if you haven't, or updating to the current 20.5 release since it seems like I had the "signal 11" crash the same day you did and I haven't hit it again (I usually update to the current nightly whenever I use it). You might also try the Qt6 version if you're still hitting it. I don't know what video card you're using
Anyway the point is reinstalling Windows isn't something that should really be done or need to be done, the problems it fixes are just as likely to come back once you get the same set of drivers and programs installed as not and it wastes a lot of time. The Windows 10 "refresh" is faster but anything it can fix can be generally be fixed with an OS repair disc in the recovery environment at worst (don't worry, that's all point & click too if you're not experienced with troubleshooting these things), and you'll likely run into the same issue again just like a reinstall. Just read the roughly 9 million MS support forum posts where one of the MS tech support zombies following a script told somebody to do this and it just wasted large amounts of their time or made things worse if you don't believe me.
You might try rolling back the most recent Windows Update too, those are known to cause problems every so often and the last one had some issue that broke a couple of things badly for whatever reason. I don't know that the fixed version is available outside of preview channel yet.
There's almost never a reason to reinstall modern Windows (by which I mean dating back to NT 4.0)... I've needed to do it roughly twice outside of catastrophic hardware failures and one was because I was intentionally trying to break my install. The other was related to having C:\Users junctioned to a different drive because of the increasingly enormous amount of space 3rd party software wastes in AppData vs. the size of SSD available at the time. This would have been grade had the target of the junction not decided to suffer from disk failure. I consider that one my fault since that setup is considered a bad move in the first place and I knew it but I was getting tired of Adobe CC generating its usual daily 10GB of logs on the OS drive regardless of where I pointed %TEMP% among other things so I junctioned that and Users instead.
Removing the loopback adapter was a great way to do it a long time ago but this isn't possible through normal means anymore AFAIK.
Corrupting the boot stores badly enough that the system will no longer start from the OS drive obviously works but this won't happen outside of a hardware failure or some heavy intentional screwing around just like the other item and won't cause this, and it can be fixed from a recovery disk / thumb drive kinda easily and isn't your issue.
If GDI32 is segfaulting there's probably something wrong with the video drivers or how Qt is calling the GDI APIs, which isn't difficult to screw up since it uses the older message-passing interfaces rather than direction function calls. Something leaking vram might be enough to cause a segfault, the caller is supposed to do checking for enough memory to create a surface / etc. I'd suggest rolling back to the previous version of the video drivers since NVidia and AMD both recently updated them within the past week, updating the video drivers if you haven't, or updating to the current 20.5 release since it seems like I had the "signal 11" crash the same day you did and I haven't hit it again (I usually update to the current nightly whenever I use it). You might also try the Qt6 version if you're still hitting it. I don't know what video card you're using
Anyway the point is reinstalling Windows isn't something that should really be done or need to be done, the problems it fixes are just as likely to come back once you get the same set of drivers and programs installed as not and it wastes a lot of time. The Windows 10 "refresh" is faster but anything it can fix can be generally be fixed with an OS repair disc in the recovery environment at worst (don't worry, that's all point & click too if you're not experienced with troubleshooting these things), and you'll likely run into the same issue again just like a reinstall. Just read the roughly 9 million MS support forum posts where one of the MS tech support zombies following a script told somebody to do this and it just wasted large amounts of their time or made things worse if you don't believe me.
You might try rolling back the most recent Windows Update too, those are known to cause problems every so often and the last one had some issue that broke a couple of things badly for whatever reason. I don't know that the fixed version is available outside of preview channel yet.
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