Painter 6 Won't Open

[Sgt. Rock]

Hi, all, I'm new to the forums. I've been here reading the board for some time, since discovering the site, and there's some great and helpful info here, to say the least.

I'm more or less a beginner using Painter 6 and I'm having a problem that I hope someone can suggest a way out of. For the last day or so, I've been having a problem with Painter opening. When I click the program name in the "Start" menu, the program opens, but I also get a dialog box that reads:

"The prefered paper library: 'PAINTER.PAP' could not be opened"

Upon clicking the "OK" button at the bottom of this same box, the program closes / crashes. I've tried deleting the program and reinstalling a couple of times, but to no avail. The problems persists.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I'm working on a PC, running Windows 98SE ( yeah, yeah I know - I need an upgrade baaaaad )

Thanks again, everybody.

[sandman]

Hi,

Looking at your error message, have you recently either renamed or moved your PAINTER.PAP library?

I believe this is the default paper library on the PC, which should (I think) be located at the top level of your Painter application folder in order for Painter to find and load it at start-up.

David

[Sgt. Rock]

Thanks, David. Your suggestion is a good to remember, although I haven't renamed or moved the file in question or anything of that nature. However, your post will be something to remind me definitely not to in future. Thanks.

At this point though, I've solved the problem. Like anyone I put as many feelers out as possible, to as many folks as I know and I received a number of good ideas. The one that seemed to work was to delete the MetaCreations folder completely. Using Add/remove Programs can leave it intact and I'm guessing whatever was wrong was based on that: my attempts at a reinstall subsequent to deleting the folder totally were more or less the same as trying to make a cake with sour milk. Right ingredient, but if it's not fresh, the cake will still taste nasty!

Deleting the folder completely allowed for a total recreation of everything and the result is that Painter is now up and running again as great as ever. I'm aware too, from another response I received, that the Pre-Built Brush file needs to be deleted from time to time. This is completely new info to me, so that may have been enormous, seeing as how I've never deleted it, and may have been resposible for the problem I was having as well. So, needless to say, it was a great learning experience.

Many thanks, all.

[Jin]

Hi again,

I've gone through your thread at In Depth Arts with a fine tooth comb and clarified things that were said, but either not correctly or not thoroughly enough to really get you off to a good start.

Please read that thread again and notice that I've added a link to a new thread I posted that will give you more information about keeping Painter 6, Painter 7, and Painter 8 running smoothly.

If you get all that under your belt (and bookmark those threads or save them to your hard drive) it'll save you a lot of grief in the future.

I gave you instructions for installing the Painter 6.1 patch and suggest that you do that. It fixes some bugs and with the patch installed, Painter 6.1 should run much better for you.

I ran it on Win98 SE for most of the time since it was released, though I now have it installed on my newer WinXP Home computer and it's still working just fine.

Goood luck, and have fun with Painter!


Jinny