I have recently downloaded the Apprentice edition of Houdini 9 (9.0.794)
Application initially installed and ran correctly the first time I used it, but now on every attempt to run the application I receive the message hmater.exe has stopped working. This happens on each and every Houdini executable iDialog.exe, gfont.exe …etc, Lis service seems to be running though. I currently run Windows Vista Ultimate edition and have an 8800 gts graphics card. Any help you can provide would be much appriciated I am evaluating software for use in developing a medical simmulation system and we would like to be able to utillize this software.

I am running Houdini under Windows Vista. I just purchased Houdini Apprentice HD and got the same errors. I rebooted and restarted windows and everything was fine. Hopefully the same will happen for you.

Maybe there is something funky in the installer on Windows Vista. Or perhaps one of the updates when I restarted fixed something?

I got the same error until today, when I downloaded the newest (Dell-approved) Nvidia driver for my 8800 GTX.

(ForceWare version 163.71)

So far so good; try it and tell us if its ok.
Jason


PS. there was a stage when I had to play Crysis for bit and then quit in order to start Houdini.

PS. there was a stage when I had to play Crysis for bit and then quit in order to start Houdini

Ah, the famous “I HAD to play it” excuse :wink: Probably the best workaround I've heard of in a while.

In all seriousness, though, if you have to start an app in order to get another app to run, it sounds like something fishy is going on in the system. My suspicions would be on the video driver, but of course I can't prove it.

Heh heh..

You can imagine it my disappointment when I finally buy myself a new nice desktop machine with a modern nvidia card (rather than the untrustworthy Radeon Mobility which gave me so much trouble on my laptop) … and I still had issues running Houdini.

Thank God I noticed that starting Crysis enabled me to use Houdini; but still quite unacceptable, considering Crysis is doing quite a bit more on graphics front than Houdini is. (Have you seen it, btw?? Beautiful stuff!)

Anyhow, we live in the constant hope that you and driver developers can one day have a beer and stop arguing.