3dsMAX 2014 x64 hangs on startup for 2 minutes

Coding
#1

Hoping others have seen this as well, as it’s affecting a few people here, sortof randomly. Max seems to fully load, but then hangs for about a minute and half afterwards. If you click around, all your clicks are queued up, and you can see them being executed quickly, once everything comes back online. No processor activity is happening. It’s acting like it’s pinging something, and waiting for a response. I’ve repaired, reinstalled, restarted, updated to service pack 5, unplugged my ethernet cable… no change.

Attaching to visual studio, and pausing while Max is hanging, the stack always displays something related to InfoCenter (the search bar in the upper right hand corner of Max). I don’t know if that’s a red herring though.

Anyone experiencing this too?

#2

I suppose try turning info center off for starters.

What kind of extra plugins do you have installed? Anything third-party or created in-house? Any scripted plugins, or scripted materials? As of 2010 or so 3ds Max still took roughly 1 extra second for every scripted material being initialized. We had quite a few at some point and the delays were adding up.
Do you have a maxstart.max startup scene? If so, what is in it? If there’s lots of material bitmaps it might be hung-up trying to locate them again on disk.

If none of those help, I’d try removing anything third-party or not part of the basic 3ds Max install and see if that narrows it down. Sounds like you may have tried that already.

#3

This is vanilla max now, nothing in-house or third-party. Is there an off switch for InfoCenter? Its settings menu is pretty limited.

I was hopeful that setting EnableCommunicationCenter to zero in regedit would do something, but nothing so far.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\3dsMax\16.0\CadManagerControl\CommunicationCenter\

still poking around…

#4

Removing/Renaming this file fixes the problem. WSCommCntr4.exe in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Autodesk Shared\WSCommCntr4\lib

I don’t know much about that file though. From http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Revit-MEP/Disable-Infocenter/td-p/3290845

#5

Found the real culprit, I think.

A registry key was being set change WSCommCntr4.exe’s default debugger (to fix an unrelated issue). So it didn’t matter if we uninstalled, etc, the problem would stay in the registry. Our fault!

Thanks for the input!