Render manager won't comp up

I'm running fusion studio 7.7.1 under win 7 64 bit. Today I needed to use the render manager for the first time in a few versions and I can't get it to run. Clicking render manager in the File drop down does exactly nothing, no error, no console message, nothing. Control-M has the same result. I've tried reinstalling, shutting down anti virus, rebooting - no change.

I thought I'd run the render manager as a stand alone to see if this gave me any clues but I can find it nowhere in the default installation and there appears to be no BlackMagic download link for it. To be clear, at the moment I'm only trying to use the Render Manager to manage renders on my local machine, but as I can't even get the RM GUI to show I'm at a dead end.

Bizarrely, if I run the UIP render script kindly posted by Blazej on this forum
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=34015&p=201880&hilit=render+manager#p201880
I can render a comp file, but I'd rather use the Render Manager as it has more features.

I'm a bit at a loss as to how to even debug this . . .

If the virus scanner and/or firewall is not in the way, possibly another application or service is using a necessary port.

I could not remember which ports you need for Fusion so I scanned my current ports.
See the attached screenshot from my system:

fusion_ports.png (10.31 KiB) Viewed 2576 times

"TCP" - Local Port - IP (127.0.0.1 loopback) - Remote Port
This could vary but what can be seen is that Fusion, QtServer and eyeonScript communicate with ports
10251 and 51518-51533 in my case.

If you have software that runs in a similar range this might be the cause for the problem.

I've used this software (please use at own risk)
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/cports.html

Many thanks for the thoughts, Blazej. Sorry about the late reply - been buried in night location (wet) shoots and only finished at 5am this morning.

I'd been messing around with port checkers, firewalls, reinstalls, services etc etc to no avail. When I finally got back to checking forums I had a reply from xmare on We Suck Less who suggested deleting the pref files and letting fusion rebuild them - and much to my surprise it worked first time. Seems incredible that you can inadvertently hide a whole gui pop up like that (still don't know how it happened) but at least it's working again.

Now that it's working I ran the currports utility you linked to and I see that Eyeonscript is happily showing up on port 10251 as per your note. As an aside, I also noticed in my flailing around that the stand alone RenderManager doesn't seem to be bundled with a fresh Fusion Studio install as it previously was with Eyeon. Not a problem for me anymore but could be for others.

Very glad you found a fix.

I made this topic to collect these findings:
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=36482

Deleting the .prefs is a big gun for a small problem. If you edit the file, you will see under RenderQueue there is a Window entry with 4 numbers, those are the corners of the window. If you set those to be a reasonable value, it may have solved the issue.

But an even easier solution is to just hit win+leftarrow or win+rightarrow and it would have snapped into place.

Thx Chad - should have known that in Fusion You have a way / workaround for everything, well almost

BMD can add it to the new comp tips for version 8. Though only the Windows versions. I don't know what the hotkey is for OSX.

Cool. I've added this solution.