Some Maestro panels fail to open on Windows with an error that includes 'common module unable to import OpenGL.GL'. Is there a fix for this problem?

This error is probably due to incompatible OpenGL libraries that are installed on your system by another software package so that they are picked up instead of the system libraries. The result is that any software that uses OpenGL will use the library belonging to that software package and can encounter the same errors. One known example of such a package is ChemOffice 2002.

To diagnose where the OpenGL failures are coming from, run the following two commands from the Commands text area in the Maestro main window (if it is not displayed, choose Maestro → Command Input Area):

pythoneval from OpenGL import GL
pythoneval import sys; sys.stderr.flush()

These commands print text in the command window that opens when you start Maestro. At the end of the text you should see a line that starts with

ImportError: ('Unable to load OpenGL library',

and ends with the path to a library. For example, if you have ChemOffice installed, you would see (on a 64-bit machine)

C:\\Program Files (x86)\\ChemOffice2002\\Common\\DLLs\\opengl32.dll

This indicates that it is trying to load the opengl32.dll library from the ChemOffice installation.

To fix this problem you need to ensure that the system-provided OpenGL library is loaded first. This library should be located in C:\Windows\System32 (or the equivalent location) and should be named opengl32.dll. To ensure that it is loaded, you need to change the PATH environment variable so that the system library is included first, for example by setting it to systemGLlib;%PATH%. Instructions for setting environment variables on Windows are given in Appendix A of the Installation Guide.

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