I find diagnosing errors in houdini to be a bit difficult. My latest frustration came when renders would simply complain and cause houdini to exit with a status of 1 - screwing up my render scripts:

Skipping unrecognized parameter “folder1”.

Not a very informative message. Turns out, I had an otl in my home directory, but not on the render machine - fair enough but it took a week to figure out what node was causing it. My real question or complaint is - why doesn't it offer a better message with the actual path to the object? :

Skipping unrecognized parameter “/obj/foo/myotlnode/folder1”.

I find this same kind of behavior when trying to figure out which one of my materials is missing a texture map. For instance:

Unable to access file foo.pic
Unable to load texture ‘foo.pic’

Again - WHICH NODE is the problem? Is it a light, or material, a vop? This seems unnecessarily hard. I even turned the mantra verbosity to max, however it offers no clues. How do others deal with this - am I missing something?

Well here it is a year later. There's been no response or suggestions on how to locate the offending source of the problem and I still have the same error message. How would one search a hip file for the parameter name if the parameter doesn't exist?