I would like to give Houdini (Apprentice) a try, but I can't seem to make it work on my computer. Installation seems to go fine, but when I start the program The first error says “Icon with name ‘BUTTONS_list_add’ does not excist”. As a result when the program is open none of all the icons is shown and the popup notifying me of this error keeps coming back up whenever I close it (“error in context event handling”).
Apart from that there are a lot of warnings in the Houdini console. They are mostly the same: “C:/Users/Me/Documents/houdini17.5/config/Icons/SVGIcons.cache.serial is not writeable” That is not that strange because when I search for the houdini17.5 directory in My Documents it is not there. So the installation program failed to create that map.
I reinstalled everything a couple of times, as administrator, with both the firewall and virus scan turned of but with the samen result. I also created the houdini17.5 directory myself and reinstalled but that didn't do anything either. Any suggestions what else to try? Thanks.

Solved! In my anti virus program (Defender) I had to temporary disable the realtime protection and the ransomware protection. I also added the Houdini installer .exe file to the ‘Trusted apps’ in the Controlled Folder Acces.

I am having the same issue right now, will try this and hopefully it solves the problem, thanks for sharing the potential solution.

Cheers,
Igor

I would like to add in case you still have those issues after turning off real time protection, make sure that folder where Houdini tries to write stuff, read only is disabled or unchecked for all subfolders inside Properties settings of the folder.