In this case, the customer reported that 64-bit Softimage abruptly shut down just after the splash screen appeared, with no errors and no sign of the actual UI. 32-bit Softimage, however, worked just fine.

This didn’t sound like the usual runonce/rename user folder/reinstall graphic driver case, so I asked him to try to run a script with xsibatch, to see if 1) xsibatch also crashes and 2) whether there is a problem with VBScript (because Softimage cannot run without VBScript).

echo LogMessage "Hello" > %TEMP%\test.vbs
xsibatch -processing -script %TEMP%\test.vbs

It turned out that there were problems with both JScript and VBScript on his system:

=======================================================
Autodesk Softimage 9.5.184.0
=======================================================

' ERROR : 2000 - Failed creating scripting engine: VBScript.
' ERROR : 2000 - Failed creating scripting engine: JScript.

To show that this was system problem, not just a Softimage problem, we tried using wscript to run a VBscript:

echo wscript.echo "Hello" > hello.vbs
wscript hello.vbs

We tried re-registering the VBScript and JScript DLLs with regsvr32, with no luck.

After some googling and experimentation on my own system, I narrowed it down to the specific registry keys:

• HKCR\CLSID\B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8 (VBscript)
• HKCR\CLSID\F414C260-6AC0-11CF-B6D1-00AA00BBBB58 (JScript)

So I exported those keys from my registry and sent them to the customer.
And after he imported them, Softimage worked!

I would have preferred to get it working without doing that (manually importing reg values), but it beats reinstalling windows. I guess.

Note that on Windows 7, you may need to change the ownership and permissions on the registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\ before you can edit any keys.