Hi Bryanna--
Thanks for your reply. My colleague who is trying to get Mach4 up and running initiated this thread from my computer here yesterday; I'm jumping in now just to add some clarifications and detail:
First, what we're doing generally, is trying to migrate to Mach4, since our current Mach3 system isn't reliable enough for us currently, despite my heroic attempts to tweak, optimize, debug, and stabilize it, over many months, going on a couple of years now.
So as to not tamper with the current Mach3 setup (which is making parts now even as I type this post), we're bringing up Mach4 on a separate computer. It's maybe a little dated, but it has an Intel Core2Duo processor running at 3.16 GHz, and it's got 4GB of memory, so I believe this should be more than adequate for Mach4. Also, we've installed a 120GB SanDisk SSD in the machine, which is formatted as just a single partition, because I'm trying to minimize file system latency, just based on the long saga of unreliability I've gone through with Mach3. Anyway so I think this machine ought to work well for Mach4.
We've just installed a clean copy of Window 7 64-bit. Then the Win7 Service Pack 1; then the chipset driver; then the graphics, Ethernet, and Audio drivers, so the motherboard has a complete set of drivers.
Then we've installed "Mach4 Hobby". I've set it to run as an Administrator, as you suggested.
Also I've disabled Windows Firewall, as well as Windows Defender, which would be the only antivirus-like thing on this system at this point.
When we run Mach4GUI.exe and then select the Mach4Mill default profile, a progress bar appears, and advances maybe 2/3 of the way across; above it it first says (something like) "Loading Screen Elements", and then "Connecting Tool Paths". At this point the program crashes, heads off into debug-report land, and freezes, so I have to use the task manager to kill the process.
This morning, we completely repartitioned the SSD and reinstalled everything again from scratch, but it just leads to this same exact result.
Any suggestions??
Thanks--
--dave