I am getting a really annoying deadline error in our render farm. When I submit a job using Deadline 3.0 with Max 2009, three of our nodes which were set up recently with XP x64 give this error:
Scheduler Thread - Render Thread 0 threw an error:
Scheduler Thread - An error occurred in StartJob(): 3dsmax startup: Max exited unexpectedly - check that max starts up with no dialog messages
(Deadline.Plugins.ScriptPlugin+FailRenderException)
Interstingly, this does not happen every time I submit a job, but more like 75% of the time. The same job that I submitted last night which rendered successfully on all machines, now fails to render on the 3. Also, when I turn on my slave it renders fine with no errors. This also happens when others submit jobs as well. We are using deadline 3.0.32106. The fault seems to lie with these 3 machines somehow. My specs are:
Win XP x32 (3 gig switch enabled)
4 gigs ram
NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512
3ds max 2009
Render DOES NOT work with:
Win XP x64
4gig ram
quad core
Forgot to mention we are using Brazil 2.0 (build 1619)
Hi there,
In the future, can you please post Deadline 3.0 related discussions and problems to the Deadline 3.0 beta board? When you respond to this post, please create a new thread in the 3.0 discussion forum (we still haven’t setup the ability to move posts yet). Thanks! 
It would be interesting to try and determine what the common factor is that causes some jobs to fail and some to work fine.
When rendering on these 3 64 bit machines, are you rendering with the 32 bit or 64 bit version of 3dsmax 2009? You can specify this option when submitting the job, and you can basically tell from the full render log which version is being used. Can you try jobs that use both options to see if the problem is limited to a particular version of Max 2009?
Also, do you see this error with other renderers, or just brazil 2? If the problem occurs with simple scenes, maybe you could submit a bunch of jobs using brazil 2, mental ray, scanline, etc to see if the problem is specific to a particular renderer.
Finally, can you post the full log that contains this error? You can get this by right-clicking on the job and selecting Job Reports -> View Log Reports.
Cheers,