Problem: On 64-bit Windows 7, 32-bit Softimage 2012 crashes instantly & silently as soon as the UI appears. But xsibatch also crashes instantly, so this is unlikely to be a graphic card problem.

Solution: Import missing HKCR\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8} values from another computer.

Case Notes:

This one had me stumped for awhile.

To repro a customer problem, I installed 32-bit Softimage 2012 SP1 on my 64-bit Windows 7 computer, but 32-bit Softimage won’t run. It just crashed silently after showing the UI, and xsibatch did nothing except print its version number banner (so I knew it wasn’t a graphics driver issue).

I checked things out with Process Monitor and I saw that Softimage was crashing shortly after loading jscript.dll. So I did a runonce, and I re-registered jscript.dll and vbscript.dll, but to no avail. I did, however, get a chance to debug after the next crash, and that showed that XSI.exe was crashing in the scripthost after loading jscript.dll.

I eyeballed the JScript registry entries, but they looked ok to me.

Finally I installed a debug version, and then I got a line number for an assert. And that showed me that Softimage was failing to get the VBscript ProgID. So I checked out the VBScript registry entries under

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{B54F3741-5B07-11cf-A4B0-00AA004A55E8}

and sure enough, the values were all missing. So all I had to do was get the missing values from another computer, import them into my registry, and case solved!