Material Libraries and Error 1606. Not Friends at All

“From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.”
 Sigmund Freud

Once again, I've crept off to Mammoth Mountain to enjoy the long holiday weekend in the United States.  But true to my geeky nature.  I've still created a blog, albeit a short one. 

Looking at Crawley Lake from Chair 3.  Amazing view!

Last week I encountered an error I hadn't seen before.  An end-user was trying to install Autodesk Product Design Suite 2012 on their machine, but they were encountering the error below when trying to install Autodesk 3ds Max.

So what does this mean? 

The user, understandably frustrated, had also tried to install the Autodesk Showcase, and received the same error.

1606

So we tried running the installation again. It turned out that it wasn't 3ds Max that was having the problem.  It was the material libraries that were associated to 3ds Max were erroring out. 

That explains why Showcase would have the same problem.  It uses the same libraries.

So I resorted to any techies next weapon of choice.   I used Google.  That's right.  That Google. It's a great tool when casting a wide net.

What did I find?  There's a solution for this on the Autodesk website.  It looks like the material libraries had been installed before, than only partially uninstalled.

A quick trip to Add/Remove Programs, and we're up and running again!

So if you run into this error, double check those libraries.

It's a good trip to keep in your pocket as we maintain, and upgrade our Product Design Suite Products.