In this case, a Softimage user reported that on a machine where Softimage had worked on consistently for years, XSI.exe was now crashing at startup with the “Failed to save scene before system failure” error. He’d done all the troubleshooting steps, but still hadn’t found a solution.

It’s hard to resist a challenge like that, so I got my hands on the Process Monitor log, and it turned out to be a bit of an easy case. I went through the Process activity, and just before the crash (you can tell the crash point by where XSI.exe does a ProcessCreate on senddmp.exe), I took a look at the DLLs loaded by XSI.exe. Usually you’re looking for something that doesn’t belong, and when I saw Microsoft, Autodesk, Flexera, Apple, Apache, and…Sendori??? I thought I might have something.

The Google results for Sendori were a bit sketchy (a DNS redirector, yikes), so we removed it, and that fixed the startup crash.