Sometimes I’ll see a case in the queue, and I’ll get curious to see if I can find the answer. In this case, there was the error message “Error loading the resource strings”, so I googled it and then searched through the our old support cases.

I didn’t find a satisfactory answer (suggested resolutions like “creating a new user profile” seem like overkill to me). So I fired up Process Monitor and logged a MotionBuilder startup. When I had the log, I spent a couple of minutes filtering down the results so I could focus on the file activity in user-specific folders like

C:\Users\blairs\AppData\Local\Autodesk\MB2010\

Sure enough, after about a minute of looking for some kind of file that suggested “resource”, I saw this file:

C:\Users\blairs\AppData\Local\Autodesk\MB2010\config\ADLM\res\en-US\AdlmIntRes.xml

So, I opened AdlmIntRes.xml, corrupted it by deleting just enough to make the XML invalid, restarted MotionBuilder, and voila:

How to fix this problem? It the file is missing or corrupted, you can force Setup to recreate the file by removing MotionBuilder, renaming the C:\Users\blairs\AppData\Local\Autodesk\MB2010\ folder (for example, to MB2010.bak), and reinstalling. Otherwise, if the file seems ok, then it could be a permissions problem, or some kind of environment/configuration problem (Process Monitor would help figure it out).

In general, Process Monitor is a great way to learn about an application. In this case, I spent some time learning what files MoBu reads at startup, and what’s in those files (I spent some additional time browsing through the various text files that MoBu opens).