I just renewed my Houdini 17 Indie license because I was getting crashes in 16.5 and now I'm getting even more crashes on 17 making the software borderline unusable. I posted on the SideFX forum already, but it seems the post was never approved by a moderator, so I'm posting the topic again.

I come from a Maya/C4D background and was curious to test out the new rigging/auto-rigging tools in Houdini 16.5/17. I was able to make it through most of Michael Goldfarb's basic rigging series using Houdini 16.5 on the SideFX learning paths, but around Christmas 2018 I started getting crashes all the time seemingly caused by very basic operations like deleting bones or changing the viewport. Since my current license was almost expired, I decided to wait until the new year to update to Houdini 17 and see if that solved it, but no luck.

First I did a bit of research and read that these types of crashes are often related to the GPU's relationship to audio drivers, more often that not, the Realtek drivers. And, I read that someone fixed their random crash problem by deleting all the Realtek drivers/software from their system. I did this both manually and by using a software called DDU, suggested by the guys who built my system, but the Realtek stuff keeps reinstalling itself.

If anyone still thinks Realtek might be the problem, does anyone know how to uninstall it without it reinstalling itself. Of course I'm also very interested to know if anyone has any other ideas. As I said, I'm not doing anything too crazy with the software and I have a pretty robust system and Graphics Card. Here are my system specs:

System Core:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X-99-Designare EX Rev 1.0

CPU: Intel Core i7 6950X 3.00GHz, Ten Core 25MB 140W

Ram: Crucial 128GB DDR4-2400 (8x16GB)

Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1080Ti 11GB

Sound Card: Onboard sound


Storage/ Hard Drives:

Primary drive: Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SATA 6Gb/s 2.5inch SSD

Secondary drive: Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SATA 6Gb/s 2.5inch SSD

Internal RAID0 Array: 6x Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200 rpm SATA III 3.5"


Case / Cooling:

Case: Fractal Design Define R5 Titanium

Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 850W P2 Power Supply

CPU cooling: 2x Noctua NH-U12DX i4

Additional Cooling: Arctic Cooling MX-2 Thermal Compound Upgrade


Software:

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

Houdini Indie 17.0.459


Thanks,

Just wanted to add that this probably seemed to be fixed by updating to the latest build.