I’ve been using Blender for several years no problem. But in the past few days it has started acting weird. First it was really, really slow. Slow to load, slow to exit, slow to maneuver around the UI. And I had simple scenes that I have worked on before no problems. And today, it started something new. If I try to switch the viewport view from anything to “Rendered”, the whole Blender screen just vanishes, and I’m staring at my desktop. I can go to solid, material, texture, etc. but not “Rendered”. Same thing happens if I try to render the scene. I even tried rendering the simple default cube exactly as it is when Blender starts, with NO modification at all, and Blender UI just disappears. I also tried setting user preferences, but when I select the “System” tab, the same thing happens. All of this is new, and has never happened before in at least 6 years of using Blender.
I have the same system I’ve had for about three or four years. Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit, ATI Radeon HD 5570, 12GB ram, 2 TB HD, Intel core i7 six-core processor 3.20 GHz. Never, EVER had any such problems.
[EDIT] I uninstalled 2.78a and reinstalled 2.76, and that works perfectly. I will try 2.77a tomorrow. But of course I would like to use 2.78a again. This is a mystery why 2.78a was working ever since I installed it when it was first released, and now it just stopped.
Check if Windows by any chance automatically installed new drivers for your graphics card recently.
If so, get the latest drivers from AMD and install those.
Since it worked before, I’d try File->Load Factory Settings. If that fixes it, then probably something has changed in your configuration. If it doesn’t fix it, then probably something has changed in Windows(video driver?)
SkpFX, thank you. That seems to have fixed the problem. I do recall seeing a box appear (very briefly) the other day, and it said something about a driver update, but I didn’t even get a chance to read it before the screen went black. After that the computer tried to reboot, but then there was a message that it couldn’t start, and do I want to repair the startup (recommended) so I did. But I guess I still needed to do what you suggested. Thanks!
[EDIT]
Well, it seems that it sort of works. I can render the default cube, but still have these issues:
One thing is that I can’t load certain .blend files at all. It just closes Blender when I try. But some of my .blend files load OK. However, none of the .blend files let me render because it crashes again.
Also, after I restored the factory settings, I saved both the user preferences and the startup file. But when I start Blender again, I can’t go to the “system” tab in user preferences because it just crashes Blender.
I have already uninstalled 2.78a, restarted my computer (cold boot after power off) and then rebooted, then reinstalled 2.78a from a fresh download of the .msi file. Still having these problems.
Funny how this thread went from “nothing changed on my machine and suddenly Blender does not work correctly” to “ah, well, of course there was that driver incident after which Windows refused to boot at all”.
The symptoms you describe are quite typical for borked graphics drivers: Reinstall them already. Installing Blender again and again will change nothing.
Yes, I agree, it’s the graphics driver. I’m not really familiar with blender’s guts, but it makes sense…
Different files have different settings(Blender internal vs Cycles, Texture maps vs no textures, maybe the UV windows open in a file, and that’s borking it)
Also, I’m fairly sure that when a file loads, it just loads as it is. But when you go to the system settings blender starts poking at the graphics hardware to sort out what the options are.
Either get the newest driver, or get rolled back to the one that worked before.
Apparently it was a graphics card driver issue, but Ikari, as I stated if you read my post correctly, I was NOT able to read which driver was updated. Anyway, I was not able to roll back the driver (the option was grayed out). However, I restored my computer to a restore point back to about a week ago, and everything works. Thanks SkpFX for your help.