This morning, Maya started acting strange, with errors about missing scripts and such. I shut the program down and now it won't start. But worse still, after uninstalling and reinstalling it, it won't start. In a final move of desparation, I took my last Norton Ghost backup (in which Maya was working) and restored it, effectively rolling back my hard drive image to August. But Maya still won't start.
I must conclude that something is wrong with my hardware, but what sort of hardware failure would cause this? Obviously, it is not a software problem. Any ideas?

Here's the two errors I'm getting this morning:



OUTPUT WINDOW
***** Error: file: C:/Program Files/Alias/Maya6.0/scripts/startup/initialGUI.mel line 54: Unrecognized parameter :0


SCRIPT EDITOR
// Error: Valid waveform options: top, bottom, both //
// MayaLive version // Error: Cannot use data of type string[] in a scalar operation. //
// Error: Object not found: //


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More details:

I first noticed a problem when I tried to access the menu, Window.... Settings/Preferences... Preferences and got a script syntax error in the command line at the bottom of the screen. Finally, I decided that perhaps it was time to reboot the OS (Windows 2000 SP4), so I rebooted. That's when the above errors appeared on startup, after the splash screen.

I tried copying all the script files over from another workstation that is running Maya 6.0.1, and overwritting the scripts on the machine with the problem. The problem remains.

I can't understand how Maya could suddenly kick out a perfectly valid script as being full of syntax errors.

After that, just for kicks, I copied the entire Maya 6.0 folder and subfolder structure from the working system to the non-working system. That didn't fix it either.

The next thing to do is run a RAM testing program for 24 hours and see if it's a problem with system memory.

By rolling back the system to Aug 29th, I ruled out virii, registry corruption, OS corruption, application corruption, etc. So that known good working SOFTWARE configuration, having been written back to the hard drive (Norton Ghost and a regular partition image backup schedule are the ultimate tools for fixing any disaster not related to hardware failure) should have restored us to a functional system. But it did not.

In all my years in computing, I have never encountered anything that Norton Ghost couldn't fix. But the rest of the system seems fine--no other applications are affected, so I'm a little doubtful it's hardware. Perhaps the computer in question is possessed by evil spirits? When logic and reason fail to solve a simple problem, even the most practical among us start to wonder what is REALLY going on inside the box...