3DS Max 2020 errors and blacked out ribbon

[Anonymous]

So I recently "rebuilt" my PC: got a newer graphics card, new RAM sticks, and an SSD hard drive. Once I set up the SSD with Windows 10 and all the necessary drivers and whatnot, I downloaded and installed Max 2020, which I did not have on my old hard drive. At first everything worked perfectly fine. Then out of nowhere I start getting this Plug-In DLL error message, followed by the ribbon toolbar being blacked out. I then downloaded the 2020.3 update patch, and then started to get this Max.NET Unhandled Exception error, with the same problem still occurring. At that point, the graphics card driver was up-to-date (newest update for it was yesterday, downloading that as we speak). I tested to see if it was a memory leak by removing and adding different RAM sticks...nothing.

I haven't tried Max 2019 yet, also downloading that to see if that works. Also have not yet tried a clean install of 2020. I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this problem, and if so is it fixable, and if it's not fixable, should I just revert back to 2019 (which I really don't mind doing)?

Cheers! 🙂

[jibijib]

Without sounding obvious - you're missing some files from Max, your config file is pointing to the wrong directory, or you've manually deleted something required for max to run from a max folder.

A common trick is moving 3DSMax.ini onto the desktop and let max startup - this resets all settings in Max, however this is undesirable as you'll lose the majority of your saved settings (hence why you should back up the file).

There are a number of .ini files in Max folders that hold settings that could be pointing to an erroneous file/path.

Uninstalling and reinstalling should fix the problem though.