3ds Max 2019 crashing on startup for some users

Several CER (Crash Error Reports) have been received from a crash of 3sd max crashing on startup.
The problem only affects a small fraction of users, never happened in any of our internal testing (and still has never happened for anyone at Autodesk, which makes debugging it... difficult). The problem is, if it happens once, it keeps happening on your machine, and even a reinstall doesn't help. This is because the problem is corrupted files in a shader cache, which is stored in a user directory, which is retained across reinstalls....

After som digging and some helpful users, we at least figured out some details. The problem affects 3dsmax 2019 update 1 and update 2 only. There is a workaround to solve this problem!!

To fix it, do the following:

  1. Open a windows file Explorer
  2. In the address bar type %localappdata%\autodesk\3dsmax\2019 - 64bit\ENU\en-US\plugcfg\
  3. In this folder you will find a ton of files named things like shader123456123456.oso with all sorts of different numbers.
  4. DELETE all these files. It's okay, they are re-created at startup. But only the ones named *.oso of course!
  5. This should solve your problem, but if it doesn't, you can download a clean set of shader cache files from this link. Unzip them to the above mentioned folder.

I am working on setting up an automated response to these bug reports, so when you push the "send to autodesk" button when max crashes, you should get the help automatically and immediately. And please everybody, do send in those error reports! They are worth their weight in gold!!

A million apologies for the inconvenience. This has been a massively complex problem to debug, since it happens so rarely, and never has been reproduced in-house. We still actually don't know why it happens, just what happens (shader cache files end up corrupted).

I hope this will help you run your 3ds max 2019 update 1 or 2.

/Z

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