Whoa, this thread has got a little out of hand. A quick follow up to our problem (from the OP):
1) Using the alt-tab mechanism to switch applications away from maya, then back, then tapping space seems to get rid of our problem.
2) If the hotbox really crashes, you can use mcp (source comes with Maya, you'll have to build it yourself):
CODE
mcp -n commandportDefault
This lets you pass mel commands straight into the open instance of Maya. Use the command
CODE
hotBox -rl
To release the hotbox.
As regards running Maya on an unsupported distro, we've never looked back. By far the most critical issue we've ever had with Maya was on a supported distro (RHEL3, iirc), and when we called them and pulled out our platinum membership card, they weren't that much use. Maybe because we're a university, not a film house? I don't know, but it took us and our IT guys a couple of weeks to figure out what the problem was. Now admittedly, the problem was listed in the release notes (we were running the KDE klipper), but that makes the problem all the more odd: surely, given our symptons, the Alias (as it was then) guys whould have known straight away what the problem was? But they just told us things which didn't make sense, to replace xorg with XF86 (even though xorg is what comes with rhel3, a supported distro).
Anyway, the point is that this experience made us realize that the support from them was not as much use as we had thought, and motivated us to try a much more advanced distro (not having to teach the students things like mounting & umounting, etc really saves us time that could be better used teaching animation).
