Category Archives: Process Monitor

The odd case of Maya Help opening in Chrome instead of the default browser

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The other day, I noticed that the Maya Help was using Chrome instead of my default browser (currently IE). I didn’t see anything in the docs about specifying a specific browser, so I figured it must be something about my system.

So, like I often do, I fired up Process Monitor to see if I could figure out why. And it was pretty simple.

I found that 

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.htm

was set to 

ChromeHTML

even though my default browser was IE.

So I changed it back to htmlfile, and voila, Maya 2012 opened the online help in IE again. There are other, similar keys, but I didn’t touch them:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.html
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.shtml
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.xht
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.xhtml
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.html

Here’s a video walk through that shows how Process Monitor can be used to diagnose and troubleshoot this kind of problem.

Troubleshooting satellite rendering with Process Monitor

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In this video, I take a look at what to look for in a Process Monitor log from a satellite rendering computer. If you don’t see what I’m showing, then the master is not connecting to the satellite.

To use Process Monitor to confirm whether the master connects to the satellite:

  1. On the satellite machine, download Process Monitor.
  2. Extract Process Monitor from the downloaded file, and start procmon.exe.
  3. On the master machine, start Softimage. The master connects to the satellite at startup.
  4. After Softimage starts up on the master machine, go back to the satellite machine and stop capturing events in Process Monitor.
  5. Review the Process Monitor log (see the video for more info).