give the current user read/write privileges to max root and all child folders/files
I do that for (trusted) domain users for the whole "Program Files" path because of all that software using paths/user profiles badly. Saves me a lot of time. And as we know, 3dsMax is one of those.
for some reason it won't on my system and tries to load settings from max root.
This is also something I allways change because I want all settings to be the same for all users. And nothing is lost when a user profile gets corrupt for some reason. This setting has been in "install.ini" to date.
Had no time to testinstall 2017 so... could you please check if ther is (still) a file called "install.ini" in the max root please? And if so, could you post it´s content for me? That would be great. Because if they changed that option, it would be a lot of work for me to migrate to 2017 here. And this could also be part of your problems.
Good Luck