For starters - if there`s a topic about this one, delete this thread.

Pretty simple - I open a TS3 hair mesh project in my milk shape (1.8.5), but the very second I select vertices and open up uni mesh bone tool 4.09 to see bone assignments - Milkshape crashes. I`ve had this problem with my old computer for months (posted here and got no reply), and now it`s the same frustration with a brand new one. I have .NET framework 3.5, Visual studio 2008 runtime, WIndows XP SP3, downloaded everything I could find and - no luck. I have no idea what to do. Is there maybe a .dll file missing or what? Utterly clueless.

Any help/idea/suggestion is welcome.

Actually, I have this same problem and was about to post it, so it's interesting to see I'm not the only one. I'd really like to know what to do too. It's whenever I try to set the bone assignments to split between HeadNew and Spine2 when attempting to make a long hair mesh. Opening the bone tool will cause Milkshape to CTD, but when I restart Milkshape and try again, it will work. But for each LOD I make, I have to go through the same procedure of crashing and starting again. (Then when I finally get all the bones assigned and try to package it with DABOOBS, DABOOBS crashes. If I assign the hair to just one bone or the other, DABOOBS works fine, but not if I assign both. So all I can achieve is either long hair that either clips back and forth through the sim's chest when they move, or that flops on and off of their head!)

Random crashes in MilkShape are almost always due to video driver problems. It is counter intuitive, because the usually happen when you are using a windows window, but MilkShape uses OpenGL, and some video drivers conflict wih non-graphic windows.

Get the Mesa DLLs at http://chumbalum.swissquake.ch/files/mesa641dlls.zip.

Note that this will likely not fix an issue where a perfectly good package that the game can use crashes DABOOBS. You know where to seek support for that.

Thank you Wes, I did d/l it, but the problem remains - as soon as I open the bone weighting tool and want to go from one vertice to another, my MS goes emo on me. However...IIRC all these problems started when I upgraded to SP3 (I`m using regular 32-bit Windows), and I have SP3 now...could it be that?

The issue is related to the video drivers and how they support OpenGL. The Mesa DLLs are a software driver and usually stop the problems. While they happen when the BoneTool is used, the crash happens in Windows. Some people get crashes in MilkShape when they are trying to select files, same issue.

What you are reporting has been an issue on some machines across all versions of Windows XP since SP1, as I remember... I don't think it is the SP version, exactly. But you should especially check your graphics driver if you have an NVIDIA graphics card... go to the NVIDIA site itself, because Windows Update was installing older NVIDIA drivers. I say this because if you updated to SP3 recently, and during the process you may well have also gotten new graphics drivers installed.

Ah, so it`s about graphic cards? I`m using an ATI Radeon 4800 series GC, and my old one was also an ATI Radeon one...well, that was 150$ not well spent...So, you`re suggesting I should update my graphic card drivers?

EDIT - Ok, went back to check out the situation, and it turns out MS crashes only when I select a part of the mesh that has 100% weighting on a bone (Head, spine 2, neck - regardless), and then try to go throught other vertices. No idea if it changes anything though...

Strange, I already had the Mesa drivers installed, but decided to try overwriting them just in case one of them had got corrupted somehow. Tried opening the bone tool again, and this time it didn't crash! Am not sure if it's just a one-off coincidence or not, but will see if it continues to work now. (I'm not using an nVidia card on the PC in question, it's a laptop with an Intel GMA950 chip.)

Updated my graphic card with latest drivers. The problem remains. Someone please tell me my meshing days aren`t over...O_o