Hmm, your problem may actually be software, or memory related then. Are you on a 64-bit system? I am. This shouldn't affect it too much, but my install location is in Program Files, not Program Files (x86).Thanks for the feedback. I was using a evga gtx 285 FTW w/2GB of DDR3 up until novemberish. That card and the 9800GT I had before it work fine with Maya up to around version 2010. From 2010 on I started getting the refresh freeze issue.
In an attempt to fix it I built a whole new system around the 285 board and still had the problem. Then the 285 actually failed and had to be replaced. It had a lifetime warranty from evga but they no longer had replacements for the 285 so they sent me a 460 with 1.5GB of DDR5 and that card was aweful!
I found that starting with the 400 series the architecture of the geforce cards was actually changed and the earlier boards including my 285 and the 9800 were based on quadro architecture and actually ran better then the 460, the 480 and even the 570hd they have me upgraded to now!!!!
Anyway I bitched up a storm and they sent me a 480 and that was no better in fact maya not only stopped refreshing the screen but this is when the behavior of not being able to exit maya once the screen refresh bug popped up started.
So I bitched some more and they sent me a 570HD and it was worse then all of them. By now, I was so frustrated that on several occasions I actually had a hammer in my hand and was ready to beat the shit of of my system!
Well further testing found that the 570HD they sent was defective! So they sent me a replacement to that. I got that replacement evga gtx 570hd w/ 2.5GB of DDR5 about a month ago. So this process of replacing my 285 has been going on non-stop since around the end of October (just over 5 months now!).
Something came up in the way of a family emergency around the time I got the last board and between that and just plane burn out from fighting this annoying problem I have not down much to test it. But I spoke to Dave and poppped open the project I have been working on a couple days ago and within 20 minutes Maya stopped refreshing the display, the outliner and channel box went blank AND I could save but not exit Maya.
So after 5 months of swapping nvidia cards I am right back at the same place I started and Maya is completely unusable to me!
What is really upsetting is I have access to 3 other systems unfortunately I must use the same graphics card and they all have the same problem with Maya, yet I can run max, modo, solidwork, inventor, all the adobe products, mari, zbrush JUST FINE! Only Maya keeps randomly ceasing to refresh the display, and update the channel box and outliner and now refused to exit.
So at this point I don't know what to say. I have worked with computers for over 30 years and this problem to me smells like a Maya specific issue. More specifically some kind of software driver, dll, or hardware device driver conflict but short of wiping my entire systems and just installing maya, I cannot seem to isolate it and I am getting absolutely no help from autodesk. Unfortunately, I do not have time to spend, nor can I afford to remove all the other software that is working just fine in the hopes to uncover a conflict with Maya.
So here I sit no longer able to do shit in Maya and quite frankly I am just sick of dealing with it!
Here are a few small things you can try for now:
1) Right click on your desktop or launch icon (in start menu) for Maya.
2) Select properties from the drop down menu.
3) Select compatibility tab.
4) On the bottom, select "Run as Administrator"
5) Near the top, select "Compatibility mode", and try running it for an OS that is below your current one. If you're on win 8, go with 7. If you're on 7, go vista. Vista, go XP.
6) Hit apply, then ok.
Try Maya for a while and see how your stability is.
If you still have an issue, I might be able to help more. I'm not an IT expert but I have been building for a while.
Run a dxdiag (type dxdiag in search bar for start menu). Hit "save all information". This will save to a text file. Copy paste that info here and I'll look over it.
