Does anyone know why the Material Editor and Render Setup windows can disappear?
I hit either the icons to open them or hit the M key and nothing. This makes the program unusable.

Have you moved from a 2 monitor system to a single one? They are probably just offscreen.

Open them (one at a time ofc), press Alt+Space then M then use the cursor keys to move it.

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

Just so people also know this… the location and size of the windows is listed in the 3dsmax.ini file.  Typically, these numbers are listed as X Position, Y Position, Width, Height.  Shut down Max, open the 3dsmax.ini file in Notepad, check these values and adjust till you see what you like.  Be careful not to play with width settings since a lot of dialogs do not stretch in width, so you may chop off text.

-RenderDialogPosition-
Dimension=1028 16 355 1072

-MtlEditorPosition-
MainWindow=339 159 368 819
MagWindow0=101 130 714 752

-RenderVFBPosition-
Position=16 102

-RenderProgressDialogPosition-
Dimension=1389 20 379 1072

-mentalrayMessagesPosition-
Dimension=620 348 656 336

-MaterialBrowserDialogPosition-
ModalDimension=1288 140 332 751

Maneswar Cheemalapati [FA]

Hey Steve Curley!
you rock man!!

you were absolutely right on the money…
Yes, I do have 2 monitors.
Followed your instructions and happily lived after !!

Thanks a lot.

Maneswar

very useful information. I will play around with it.

Thanks

Generally you should only ever need to alter the 1st 2 numbers (x-position and y-position) to get a dialog back on screen. IIRC there are a couple of entries where it it not the 1st 2 numbers, so take care when editing ini files - make a copy of it first.
If you remove it completely (3dsmax.ini I mean) then Max will create a new clean one which is great if it gets corrupted in any way, but you do lose any customisations you may have made - just something to be aware of.

@Mane - welcome back, where have you been hiding? :P

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

Steve, I’m being overworked and overstressed. :) I hope I’m back again for a while. 

I see you finally got the position.  Yay! :)

Maneswar Cheemalapati [FA]

Yep - someone left the door open.. :D

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