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I'm running 3.1.0.1. Whenever I make a new material through the Maxwell Material Editor, the thumbnails in Windows Explorer just have a default, diffuse grey sphere with a "NO PREVIEW" note on top. I looked at the list of my installed programs and that's where the weird part comes in. "Maxwell 3" is correctly listed as version 3.1.0.1, but the "Maxwell Shell Extension (x64)" is listed as version 3.0.993. Is the shell extension reading the Maxwell version of the MXM files and comparing it to itself, then returning a default thumbnail because the MXM files appear newer than the shell extension?

Just a thought. It doesn't crash or anything, but those thumbnails are really handy when I'm picking a reference material from within 3ds Max.

Thanks Next Limit!

I'm not seeing that here, so could you please send (to jeremy at nextlimit dotcom) a few MXMs that show this behavior?

Hey JD,
I just sent you an e-mail with download instructions. Thanks for checking into this!

Solved
Thanks to the help of JDHill, I was able to get this back to a working state. If anyone has this same problem while creating or saving MXM files, try the following:

(For Windows 64-bit OS)

1. Uninstall the Maxwell shell extension
2. Reboot
3. Reinstall the Maxwell shell extension, either by:
   • running the ".msi" file inside: C:\Program Files\Next Limit\Maxwell 3\shell\x64
   • re-running the Maxwell installer and unchecking all of the components except for "MXM Explorer Thumbnails"
   NOTE: Make sure you're using the correct architecture for your OS; 32-bit shell overlay with 32-bit OS and 64-bit shell overlay with 64-bit OS.
4. Reboot

For any pre-existing MXM files that still don't have a preview, try clearing your thumbnail cache. Depending on whether or not your MXM files are on a network share or saved to a local disk, you may end up having to delete some hidden thumb.db files (should be sibling files to your MXM files) and (for Windows Vista and up) using the Disk Cleanup utility to delete "Thumbnails". CCleaner also has an option for deleting "Thumbnail Cache" if you're familiar with using that application.

Thanks!