I stumped my teacher with this one as well. I installed 3DS Max on my new windows vista operating system. I did a clean install then reinstalled programs. Unfortunately, ever since I reinstalled 3DS Max (Tried twice now) the problem has existed. Problem: All my view ports show up white and blank. This goes away when I start navigating by holding down my scroll wheel and I get the normal view whether its Top, Front, User.. At first i considered it to be a monitor driver problem, but I have ruled that out with updated drivers. I know it ran fine before on the hardware, so my only worry is that Im missing a plugin or something. If anybody has got any ideas I would really appreciate it. -Tim

3ds max is not currently officially supported on vista yet. to make matters worse, ati and nvidia have half-baked drivers for the video cards (they're getting better as time goes though). so you might be out of luck for a while untill things get sorted out, you could try software rendering though.

I got max 9 working by right clicking the icon, run in xpsp2 compatability mode, run as admin, and most important, Disable desktop composition.