Windows 7 32-bit
ATI Radeon Mobility 4100 HD
Blender 2.56a
Opening a .blend file saved with 2.56a results in all images not being found though they are in the same location. Having saved several of the same .blend for backup purposes only one of the saved files resulted with this problem. Using report missing files seems to indicate the the file paths to all of the images used in the .blend were saved improperly. This line reveals the path reported by the .blend:
Image "1px_blue_fade.png", "C:\Blender\new\Blender\tex\1px_blue_fade.png": file not found
all of the images in the .blend file are reported with the same anomaly. The true file path should be:
.blend file: "C:\Blender\new\*.blend
image file: "C:\Blender\tex\*.png
it would appear that Blender had taken the .blend path and then appended the path to the image rather than utilizing just the path to the image. I had never used the 'make all paths relative' or 'make all paths absolute' options so whichever is default, probably absolute, should be the method Blender used to save the image paths.
Description
Event Timeline
If you add images or other files in Blender, we have the option to use relative paths. That's indicated in the filewindow (option in left hand toolbar).
A relative path in Blender is a file path that starts with the current .blend file location, and gets encoded with "//" as first two characters.
This system should work fine - already for a long time - but you have to keep track of this carefully.
Check the file paths in your .blend how they are constructed. It's visible in toolbar properties (press Nkey) in Image Editor.
I certainly could be wrong on this, but just to give some additional information let's say I had saved 4 of the exact same .blend files. That is I save a .blend then go and hit save as 3 times ending up with 1.blend, 2.blend, 3.blend and 4.blend, all files should be exactly the same. Even though none of the .blend files were moved and none of the images were moved 1,2, and 3.blend work fine, but 4.blend says none of the images could be found and the file paths to all of the images are different than in the 3 other .blend files.
It's not a particularly big deal because find missing files was able to make things easy, plus I had 3 other working files. I might add that after doing find missing files there were still 10 or so textures that I had to hit the reload key on. That is it found the image and corrected the path, but would keep complaining that the image was not found until I went into the material's texture layer and hit reload.
After correcting all of the image paths I hit 'make file paths absolute' and all of the images vanished and the error of missing images came back. I then had to hit find missing files again and hit reload on the same 10 or so textures.