Just saw there is a dedicated apprentice forum… duh! Could a mod remove the thread from the general discussion, please? This seems to be the place where I should've posted in the first place, I reckon - sorry.

Now to the actual problem - I'm really at a loss here, so please bear with me. I've been using Houdini Apprentice on my Windows 7 machine (intel xeon, windows 7, nvidia quadro with latest drivers, 254.xx if i remember correctly) for quite some time now - without ever having had any issues with it. Now today I tried starting Houdini and nothing happened: I had hmaster.exe show in the task manager, but no UI loaded… or anything else for that matter.

So I downloaded the latest build from the webpage, uninstalled the version I had on my computer (which was 10.0.430) and installed the version I had just downloaded. Now, the computer hung at installing the gfont.exe, which I figured was not much of an issue after reading around here. However, even if I kill the gfont.exe process during installation, houdini will hang during install again - this time while installing hkey.exe

Now, if I kill that process as well, I will get through the install, but won't be able to run the software: Again, hmaster and hkey.exe will show in the task manager, but nothing will actually show up.

I tried most of the stuff that you'd go for first, like cleaning the reg, deleting all files and such, all to no avail. Does anyone know what could be causing this?

Any help is greatly appreciated, cheers