Not sure if this is normal (I don’t feel like it is) but the SMTD window pops up in rendering scenes.
That’s weird. We haven’t seen or heard of this behavior before. Does it pop up for local renders or Deadline renders (or both)? If it happens during Deadline renders, are you rendering in workstation mode? Even if it’s in workstation mode, I can’t think of anything that would trigger it to pop up…
We made a significant change to SMTD a few betas ago.
The actual SMTD UI is now “headless”, it is not a MacroScript anymore, but a regular script which, if executed, would open the UI.
This was done to enable us to reuse the same script file for both regular submissions and RPM submissions.
When you run the SMTD launcher MacroScript, all MS files needed to run SMTD are being copied over from the Repository into the #userscripts folder. This is done to speed up the SMTD loading by pre-evaluating the scripts on Max startup. The actual SMTD UI script is NOT being pre-loaded to avoid what you described - it is only loaded when you run the SMTD Launcher (Deadline Client) MacroScript.
But if for some reason the folder #userscripts was declared as either a plugin path in the Plugin.ini or as a Startup Scripts folder in the Max path settings, then any MS files found in that folder would be executed on startup, and the “headless” SMTD UI would be one of them, thus popping up during Max startup.
On my machine,
GetDir #userscripts
produces
“C:\Users(USERNAME)\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2013 - 64bit\ENU\scripts”
Can you check whether that path is declared as a startup or plugin path on the machines where you are seeing this behavior?
Note that Max will consider any sub-folders of plugin paths as startup folders for scripts, so if for example “C:\Users(USERNAME)\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2013 - 64bit\ENU” was set to be a plugin path, all its sub-folders would be scanned for scripts to be run on startup.
It is quite possible your paths are set differently and something is causing the content of #userscripts to be evaluated while it should not be.
"C:\Users\ggreenwalt\AppData\Local\Autodesk\3dsMax\2013 - 64bit\ENU\scripts"I don’t see anywhere that would be causing it to startup except for the startup script.
Tried removing the startup script and it still opens when I just start max. 
Oops! I deleted the 2012 scripts. Deleting the 2013 SMTD_Loader.ms stops it from opening…
I did not expect this to happen because the Launcher Macro recreates the Startup script each time you launch SMTD.
So I assumed that the first time you install and run the new Client script, it would update the Startup script.
Not sure how you got the new script with old Startup file - probably by launching the OLD Client script after updating the Repository to the new headless version…
Glad it is working now.
It’s not really “working” I just mean it’s definitely the startup script which is causing it to open every single time I start Max. Isn’t the behavior supposed to be that it runs in the background? It shouldn’t be opening when I start Max. If I delete the script from the startup folder it will stop launching on startup. I’ve just isolated the cause not the solution. 
So did you remove your old SMTD Launcher and did you replace it as instructed with the new one shipping with Beta 18 and 19?
Without that, SMTD Launcher would not work right, and the old version would be doing the wrong thing.
The old one appears under “Deadline” category as “Submit To Deadline” or “Submit Max To Deadline”.
The new one appears under “Deadline” category as “Submit Max To Deadline 6”.
In order to get the latest one, you have to execute the script found in your
…DeadlineRepository\submission\3dsmax\Client\Deadline3dsMaxClient.mcr
It should have a date from some time in April.
Then add the new script to a toolbar or menu.