A few times now, I’ve gotten this error, and the only way to fix it has been to delete my prefs folder. I’m guessing only one file really needs to be thrown away — not the whole folder, but which is it?

I’m in the middle of working on a thesis so I don’t really have time to test them one at a time (much less in combination, etc.), so I was wondering if someone has already done this — or just has a good idea as to which pref file it could be.

Here’s the message:
Fatal Error. Attempting to save in
C:/Users/Xxxxx/AppData/Local/Temp/Xxxxx.20091109.1105.ma

With the corrupt prefs still in place, I can trigger this by making any simple alteration on a construction history input node. For example, beveling a few edges of a cube and then changing the offset in the channel box.

By the way, this error first happened when I accidentally performed a chamfer (instead of a SOLID chamfer) with Byron’s PolyTools on some edges ... I was using the latest version for my system.

This same thing used to happen to me with Maya 2008, but I am now using Maya 2009 64-bit sp1 on Vista Home Premium 64.

the file you want to delete is “userPrefs.mel”.  I usually do this the “safe” way by just renaming it (like “userPrefs.old") but I’ve never had to go back to the old version.  Old habits, I guess.  Anyway, your bevel problem might be something else - sometimes you can have an extra face in that edge and not know it, like if you have extruded a face without translating or scaling it and not hit “undo”.  The default selection setting makes this an easy mistake to make.  I prefer to set my “face selection” to “center” (in the selection prefs).  This gives me a little blue dot wherever there is a face, and makes it very easy to spot the unwanted ones.