Took me a while to diagnose (and one fresh 3DS Max re-install later) but as per title - when opening a fresh max instance on my workstation, the usual plugins would appear to load, then I could see four empty viewports i.e. grid hasn't loaded yet, and then Max would freeze for several minutes before the interface became responsive and fully loaded.
This appeared to be a new problem but after some investigation using sysinternals Process Explorer I could see Max was trying to access the IP 192.xxx.xxx.xxx:30304, being the PC that holds the license dongle, and it was repeatedly failing. This machine usually is on - but as I was on a break over xmas it was off.
This is more of an FYI - although if this was an easy fix then that would be awesome. There are some obvious workarounds but I like using a dongle (easy to grab it and head off to a meeting with my laptop). And the dongle lives in a machine that isn't used for rendering or sometimes on my laptop depending on what I'm doing and where I feel like working.
This appeared to be a new problem but after some investigation using sysinternals Process Explorer I could see Max was trying to access the IP 192.xxx.xxx.xxx:30304, being the PC that holds the license dongle, and it was repeatedly failing. This machine usually is on - but as I was on a break over xmas it was off.
This is more of an FYI - although if this was an easy fix then that would be awesome. There are some obvious workarounds but I like using a dongle (easy to grab it and head off to a meeting with my laptop). And the dongle lives in a machine that isn't used for rendering or sometimes on my laptop depending on what I'm doing and where I feel like working.