I've browsed the forums and tried to search to find a specific issue that I've been having, but so far haven't found it.

This may or may not be a bug. I can produce it over and over again, but here is the problem.

Whenever I start the program and press tab to add a SHOP. I can double click it and it goes to the next level and I can add anything after that. This is okay, but whenever I want to choose a texture map, the dialog box opens and then when I click to browse Houdini locks up and then crashes to desktop. If I use the normal file dialog menu to open a scene or model, its just fine, it only crashes when I'm in the SHOP browsing for my texture map.

My System specs are, 1.8 Intel Dual core, 2GB ram, nVidia 8500GT. I'm using Windows XP Home SP3 (yeah I know I should get the pro at least). I've updated all of my video drivers and everything else, but to no avail. This never happened when I was using SP2.

I tried to look for the crash log Houdini spits out as well, but I couldn't find it.

This is the only bug preventing from going ahead and purchasing the HD version of this software. It sucks not being able to load my textures for my models. (Its a bit of a show stopper)

I also just downloaded the newest apprentice version, but that didn't help either.

Thanks for any help!

I find that stuff like this is sometimes to be an Open GL issue.

To be certain I would see if Houdini crashes when opening up any other file dialogs. Open up a few dialogs, say for a file SOP, shake them around and see if you are getting the same problem.

If not then my guess would be that the dialog is trying to open to a location that doesn't exist and falling over as a result. You could try entering the path to the file directly and then opening it to see if the same happens.

If the issue seems to be persist try downgrading the graphics driver. Sometimes having the latest driver isn't necessarily the best thing.