Hi there
I have the following problem. I already tried to contact Autodesk several times but they don’t respond… nice one…
We have one floating license in our office. The FlexLM is installed on our server and is up and running. I installed Max9 on two Windows XP32 systems. Everything’s fine. Both machine can run Max9. Not at the same time of course… Even backburner works fine.
Now I ran in a problem during the installation of Max9 on a XP64 system. I want to install the 32bit version of Max so I can use all machines in the backburner. I used the deployment installation wizard to create a new installation image. The complete installation runs through just fine and finishes without any warning or reported problem. But when I try to start Max an error comes up saying ‘winzip32.dll is missing’. It is not a license problem as I interpretate it. If Max doesn’t find a proper license it complains about that.
Does anybody have a similar problem?
It would be great to get some hints because up to now Autodesk doesn’t give us any support…
Cheers
Peter

Who is your dealer?  Have you tried to contact your reseller for support on this issue?
And when you say Autodesk doesn’t give you support, what do you mean?  Do they not answer the phone?  Tell me more…

I don’t know the answer to your question, off the top of my head.  You might search to make sure winzip32.dll is in fact installed on the system in question.  This is on the 64 bit machine, yes?  Do you have dual boot set up there - 2 OS’s.

I assume you know it’s not recommended that you mix renderings on 32 and 64bit OS’s.

Pixels, Polygons, get’m while their hot

Thx for your quick answer.
I contacted our reseller here in UK and he reported to Autodesk Thursday the 4th. But up to now no reply (ref number 1-2522939081). I just got a little bit upset because we pay for platinum support on both packages Max and Maya and didn’t hear anything… So I tried this forum to get some help.
In general I know that it’s not recommended to run Max 32 on a XP64 system. Nevertheless I decided to go this route because I want to use all machines for the backburner. Aslong as backburner can only address either 32 or 64 this is the only way around it, or? And second I even tried to install the 64bit version but it didn’t start as well. Coming up with another error but not a license error. It was running fine when I installed it on the XP64 as a stand alone version.
There is now dual boot istalled. Just XP64.
Peter

Hey Peter,

You DON"T want to try to network render on mixed OS.  If you want to use the 64 bit machine as part of the backburner network farm, reboot it to 32 bit OS.  I don’t have direct experience with this, but have heard many times that the color space used by the 64 bit OS won’t match the 32 bit renderings.

If I were you (since you have platinum support) I’d call Montreal directly and see what’s up with your support call.  Monday was Canadian Thanksgiving, so that might have something to do with it.

Pixels, Polygons, get’m while their hot

Installing XP32 on all the XP64 machines would be the last thing I would like to do. As in general we don’t do too many animations I wanted to see if the results are OK for still images before I approach this OS change. And if I have an animation in the production I can only use one type of machines, no? Still faster than just one :-)
I’ll try to contact the Montreal guys tomorrow. Do I find their ontact on the subscription website or is it on the Autodesk website?
P

Here is the general support number:

Americas
Monday to Friday, 8am – 8pm EST (excluding certain international holidays)
Support Hotline: 1.877.347.2733 Toll-free
Direct dial: 1.514.954.7550
Fax: 1-514-954-7254

Europe, Middle East and Africa
Monday to Friday, 9 AM – 5:30 PM, local time (excluding certain international holidays)
Support Hotline: 00.800.3472.7338 (toll-free within UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain)
Direct dial: +44.207.851.8090

Tell them you’re platinum support and they’ll give you another number to call.

I don’t want to scare you about the 64 bit OS.  Just don’t mix the renderings in a single shot. I’ve been seeing a lot of good coming from 64 bit lately.  Don’t expect it to render any faster, but you will be able to handle much larger files.

Pixels, Polygons, get’m while their hot

Ok. We found a solution.
The problems are caused by the buggy deployment software which comes on the DVD. So if you want to install a floating license 3dmax version install it as a stand alone version and switch it either during the installation process into a floating one by choosing ‘network license’ or afterwards. I don’t know if I ‘m allowed to post the second solution here in the forum. Perhaps it’s better to contact your support team for that. The first solution works fine when you do a complete new installation…
Enjoy
P

Funny thing is that winzip32.dll is probably being used by very little in Max… maybe the network part, and maybe the archive part, since winzip.dll is the compression functionality built into XP and Max is now apparently relying on it, or perhaps it has it’s own.  You would have run into problems if Backburner relies on it to extract the file or if the archive feature was used, but otherwise, things should have probably worked fine.  You could have tried copying the 32 bit DLL from an XP 32 machine and placing it onto the 64 bit machine, but I wouldn’t say that was a good solution or a reliable one at that.  Might have worked though… who knows.

Anyway, glad you have it resolved.

Maneswar Cheemalapati [FA]

Can you email me the second solution you don’t want to post?  Send it to mgerhard at rand dot com, if you please.  Thanks for your persistence here and glad you got it solved.

Pixels, Polygons, get’m while their hot

I looked and there is an unzip32.dll and a zip32.dll in the 3dsmax folder, and in System32, there is a zipfldr.dll.  I don’t know where the winzip32.dll error was coming from, but anyway.

Maneswar Cheemalapati [FA]

Customise > Preferences > Files (tab) > Archive System (bottom right corner).

Perhaps the OP had changed the default of “maxzip” to “winzip”?

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.