Hi there. I'm really at a loss here, so please bear with me. I've been using Houdini Apprentice on my Windows 7 machine for quite some time now -without ever having had any issues with it. Now today I tried starting Houdini and nothing happened: I had hmaster.exe show in the task manager, but no UI loaded… or anything else for that matter.

So I downloaded the latest build from the webpage, uninstalled the version I had on my computer (which was 10.0.430) and installed the version I had just downloaded. Now, the computer hung at installing the gfont.exe, which I figured was not much of an issue after reading around here. However, even if I kill the gfont.exe process during installation, houdini will hang during install again - this time while installing hkey.exe

Now, if I kill that process as well, I will get through the install, but won't be able to run the software: Again, hmaster and hkey.exe will show in the task manager, but nothing will actually show up.

I tried most of the stuff that you'd go for first, like cleaning the reg, deleting all files and such, all to no avail. Does anyone know what could be causing this?

Any help is greatly appreciated, cheers

this is really killing me… i have *no* clue what could be causing this. as far as I remember the only thing that changed between the last time I opened the program to now that it does not do anything anymore is that I installed a new nVidia driver for the Quadro in the system. …I somewhat doubt this could be causing the problem, though. Nonetheless, I uninstalled the driver and installed an older version - also to no avail.

Does anyone have any hint as to where I could look for a possible solution?

There were a few reports of this issue but we have not been able to figure out what is happening. There is a bug logged for it: 37839. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

It looks like the applications (gfont.exe, hkey.exe, etc) cannot launch for some reason. It could be some security barrier (perhaps installed with the auto-update for win7) that causes the problem.

rafal
There were a few reports of this issue but we have not been able to figure out what is happening. There is a bug logged for it: 37839. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

It looks like the applications (gfont.exe, hkey.exe, etc) cannot launch for some reason. It could be some security barrier (perhaps installed with the auto-update for win7) that causes the problem.

Thanks for the info, rafal. Will go for a clean re-install in the meantime, as I don't really have that much stuff on my home machine anyways. Cheers