I'm having proplems correctly installing Houdini, I've tried with 3 versions including current stable and latest nightly build.

It installs houdini correctly, but when it tries to do the fonts it crashes with a “gfont.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close”

Houdini then works correctly, but the font is all wrong, and it makes the program very frustrating to use.

I am using a pretty new and clean installation of windows XP SP2, on a dual core AMD 3800+ and a 7800GTX.

If anyone knows of a work around or a cure, it would be much appreciated

The gfont.exe crash is likely because it encountered a malformed truetype font that you have installed. It only affects the Font SOP though so your Houdini installation should be fine.

The problem that you show in the screenshot is more likely due to your driver settings. In the display driver options for Performance and Quality settings, make sure you turn on Application-Controlled.

I'd be interested in finding out the misbehaving font. From the Start Menu where you installed Houdini, choose Command Line Tools. At the prompt, run “gfont -Sv”. This will do the same thing as what the install program does except it prints out which font it is processing. When the program crashes, the last line printed out will be the misbehaving font. Let us know the filename.

Processing CWINDOWS/Fonts/Benfolds.ttf

Looks Like it was a custom one of mine, I deleted it, and it all works now. Thanks.

I had the exact same issue - gfont.exe would crash on install and then Houdini 9.0.674 would not run under Vista Ultimate 32bit.

The issue is: gfont is unable to write to font.index in > pathToHoudini/fonts/font.index - due to permissions.

If anyone else runs into this, select the font.index file, right click and select properties and under the security tab, edit the Users group and with Users selected, tick all the boxes under "allow".

Then from the Command Line Tools run gfont -Sv again and the index will be succesfully built.

Hope this helps!

Matt.