Modeler won't launch (Mayday Mayday!!)

[mattclary]

OK, I'm freaking baffled and really pissed off.

Using LW 7.5, Win XP, Wildcat VP 970

When I launch modeler, it will only actually launch 50% of the time or less. No errors, just flash and gone. LightWave launches just fine, all the time.

What I've tried:
1. The first thing I did, of course, was delete all CFG files (several times)
2. I reinstalled, uninstalled and reinstalled, reinstalled again the video driver (which has been working fine for about two months)
3. Completely uninstalled and reinstalled LightWave (moving from 7.5c to 7.5 in the process
4. Logged in as a NEW user, one that never existed before

None of this has worked.

I know when the problem started, but it's retarded and makes no sense: I was working on the head tutorial in the Inside LW 6 book, I noticed my monitor (an LCD) was flickering in the pupils (probably some OpenGL transparency weirdness), I looked at my refresh rate and it was set to 75hz. I switched it to 60hz and Modeler has not lauched reliably again, as I said, 50% at best.

I am about 3 nanoseconds from an Fdisk! Anyone have any ideas before I rebuild the whole freaking thing?

[Doug Nicola]

Wild guess: something in your video card/openGL went screwy when you reset refresh rate? Some kind of hardware failure on your card that is messing up OpenGL initialization with modeler, maybe? Just a guess.

If you have another spare OpenGL card lying around (don't we all?), maybe you could take out the current one and try another.

Also maybe try different refresh rates on your current card to see if there is a connection?

An Fdisk at this point seems a little drastic.

[mattclary]

Drastic?! Doug, do you see the tatoo?! :) A man has to have his priorities! :)

I'll see if I can dig up another card. Right now I'm running sans drivers using default VGA. Been running regmon and filemon to see if I can gather anything, haven't had much luck yet.

[mattclary]

OK, that didn't work either. Have a new card (Hercules Kyro) in as I type, have the same problem. :(

[WCameron]

hmm that is weird. all I can think of is maybe try dissabeling the hub? possibly some kind of tcp/ip issue and the refresh rate thing
is just a coincidence...


- Will.

[mattclary]

As a rule I use the -0 command option to disable the hub. I even tried removing that to see if it would help and it made no difference.

Oh well, that OS has been on there almost two months, it was getting a little stale anyway... :rolleyes:

I e-mailed Newtek tech support, lets see if I get a response.

[hunter]

I have exactly the same problem. Layout opens fine but modeler just flashes and gone. Tech support told me it's probably a bad dongle.

[mattclary]

Funny, I just got that e-mail from them a little while ago. Going to try to reinstall new drivers tonight. Still think I'm going to fdisk before I send them my dongle back. If it works after the fdisk, we know it's not the dongle.

Seems like they'd have a utility program that could test the dongle.

[hunter]

I think you can download one at rainbow technologies site. It said my dongle was fine. go figure.

[JohnL]

Do you use a firewall? ZoneAlarm maybe?

I had the same problem you described after upgrading ZA and had to manually allow Modeler to access my network.

Now everything works just fine.

[mattclary]

Nope, no firewall (other than on my router) no Zone Alarm. I fdisked the machine and could still reproduce the issue, so I'm leaning towards a bad dongle as stated by Newtek. I'm getting ready to test it on another machine, will post my findings.

[mattclary]

OK, just confirmed I can reproduce on a second machine. Looks like a bad dongle.

[Rich]

I had the same problem back when I had Lightwave 6 and I had the old parallel dongle. When I upgraded to 7 I switched to the usb dongle and from then on everything worked perfectly.