Hey there,

3D modelling assignments for university have led me to Maya 8.5 PLE. However, while working through the most basic tutorials, I'm encountering a serious problem, and now I fear that this assignment will be impossible for me to finish. Searching for the problem on the Web yielded no results.

A description of what's happening: in the last phase of the Maya Basics tutorial, we're asked to assign a material to our shapes (Blinn with a certain colour). Following the instructions, the Attribute Editor is opened and I have just created the Blinn material. But then, as I choose one of my objects from the 'Selected' drop-down box, the program appears to be loading data for a second and then just crashes. I get a message saying an unknown error has occured and that the program needs to be shut down. This happened multiple times in a row at the exact same moment, so it wasn't coincidental.

As said, this happens in the PLE version Maya 8.5. My PC is a weird story; since my old desktop one is too weak to run the program, I had to switch to a notebook, which happens to run on Windows Vista Home Premium (indeed, I don't think it was on the specifications list, but I've read comments of others who had no problems with it). It has 1 GB of memory and its graphics card should be fairly new; I never paid much attention to such things, though, so I'm no expert. However, I highly doubt I'll have the chance to upgrade my system before the assignment is due.

Short version (sorry, I'm wordy):
- Maya 8.5 PLE crashes whenever I want to look up the material properties of an object (or so it seems);
- I'm using a fairly new Vista Home Premium notebook with 1GB of memory. Expansion or switch of system is most likely no option within the time frame.

Any ideas? Does this sound familiar? Is it a compatibility problem, or did I miss some hidden menu option or trick that might fix the issue?

I sincerely hope someone's out there who knows what to do. If there's any other information you need in order to help, please let me know.

Thanks in advance,
Woep