I’m a character TD at a game studio. I’ve been using Max for a few years now, and issues with the modify panel are nothing new to me; throughout my time with Max, there have been occasional bugs. Sometimes the modify panel glitches out, and refuses to report until Max is restarted. At one point it was causing the program to hang for a second when a new object is selected.

But recently I’ve run into a new and particularly annoying problem. We got a couple of new animators set up, and on both of their machines, selecting objects on the rig causes Max to lock up, stone cold, not responding to windows, and maxing out one core of the processor. Sometimes it comes back after 30 or 45 seconds (and then immediately locks up again on the next selection). Other times, the hang appears to be permanent.

This happens frequently (usually within the first 4 or 5 picks), but not on every pick. It only happens when the modify panel is open. And it happens on these two machines, while the rest of our animators have been using the same setup for years without issue (well, at least without _this_ issue).

It wouldn’t surprise me if the rig were at fault somehow; it’s custom, heavy, and for legacy reasons it is necessarily composed of CAT objects, further complicating the situation. Plus it employs some spooky event-driven callbacks. But the bug persists even when all of my scripts are removed from the installation, so I think I’ve ruled those out as suspects. If the scene is at fault, it’s something in the dependency graph itself, or in the internal attribute scripts.

In any case, if it is a scene bug, I’m perplexed at how it manages to be so machine-specific.
Being so machine-specific suggests maybe a driver bug… but if it’s a driver bug, I’m perplexed at the way it manifests; usually a driver bug leaves the processor idling at zero while it waits for a response. Besides, the modify panel is just a bunch of windows buttons… seems strange if it is sensitive to drivers…

Any ideas?