maya doesn’t show its viewport?

since i’ve been accepted to the digital character animation program in vancouver, i’ll need to add some maya skills in the next 6 months before i go to canada. that said i recently downloaded the personal learning edition version of maya 8.5 from the autodesk website. i was lucky since they upgraded the ple version to the newest version lately. after receiving the key and a successful installation of the maya application i wanted to dig into this promising package. easily said but the first hurdle is already there: i couldn’t see any viewport at all, just an output and a script window. great. after hours of browsing forums for a solution to this exotic problem and even calling my local autodesk dealer absolutely no one could help me out of this misery. then – days after nearly giving up – i found a very simple reason: it was just an old version of the nvidia gelato software on my workstation causing all the trouble. i deinstalled it and there we are: maya could show the viewport again. let’s hope my next steps won’t be so hard to take!