Whenever you start having strange problems in Softimage, it’s a good idea to try resetting your User preferences. You can do this by renaming the default.xsipref preference file in %XSI_USERHOME%\Data\Preferences (for example, to default.xsipref.backup). The restart Softimage; that will recreate a factory-default default.xsipref file.

Tip If resetting the preferences doesn’t fix the problem, then try renaming your User folder (for example, to C:\users\blairs\Softimage_2010.backup). That will force Softimage to recreate the whole User folder. Sometimes the problem is not the preferences, but some other file or setting in the User folder.

So why does resetting the preferences fix strange problems? Usually we just assume there was a bad preference setting, or a bad combination of settings. But I’m not so sure.

The other day a customer called with a problem: he couldn’t see his blendweight fcurve in the Animation Editor. I Webex’d to his machine to check it out, but I couldn’t get it to work either: right-click the animation icon and click Animation Editor, but there’d be no fcurve. I could repro on my own machine, but my colleague Manny couldn’t repro on his. So I renamed my default.xsipref, restarted Softimage, and then I could see the blendweight fcurve. This worked for the customer too.

Later, I compared the factory-default default.xsipref with my backed-up version, and tried to reproduce the problem by hand-editing my new default.xsipref. But I couldn’t. Eventually I put back my original default.xsipref (the one I had when I could repro the problem), but even then I could not reproduce the problem.

So. Resetting the preferences fixed the odd behavior, but putting back the “corrupted” preferences file didn’t bring the odd behavior back. It seems like it is not the content of xsipref file itself, but the act of forcing Softimage back to the factory-defaults that resolves the problem.

A Softimage 7.5 user was getting this error at startup. The fix? Rename the User folder.

Yet another weird error fixed by one of the two old chestnuts of troubleshooting: 1) renaming the User folder, and 2) running runonce.bat.

Softimage (formerly known as XSI) depends on VBScript. If there is a problem with VBScript on your system, Softimage just won’t start. Typically, you won’t see anything when you try to start XSI.exe, or you may see the splash screen just before XSI crashes. I see a couple of these cases each year.

Here’s a quick way to check whether VBScript is working on your system:

1. Click Start > All Programs > Softimage Products > SOFTIMAGE XSI 7.01 > Command Prompt.
2. In the command prompt, run this command notepad hello.vbs.
3. Click Yes to create the file.
4. In Notepad, type this: LogMessage “hello”
5. Click File > Save.
6. In the command prompt, run this command: xsi -script hello.vbs
7. If VBScript is not registered properly on your system, you’ll get the error

   ‘ FATAL : The VBScript engine is not installed. This application requires VBScript to run.

To resolve the problem, use these steps:

• Click Start, Run and type regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\vbscript.dll
• If the registration was successful, you should now see the following message: DllRegisterServer in vbscript.dll succeeded.

If the above does not help, of if you receive an error message when registering vbscript.dll, then try installing Windows Script 5.6.

Another way to test VBScript, is to create a .vbs file with this code:

WScript.Echo "Hello World"

and then run it from the command-line:

cscript hello.vbs

If you get the Can’t find script engine “VBScript” for script error, then run regsvr32 %systemroot%\system32\vbscript.dll.