Compiler help? crashes/errors.

[Christmasham]

Hey there,

I'm currently trying to convert some ragdolls to playermodels, I followed a tutorial I found on facepunch and have gotten to the point in which I now need to re-compile my files,
so I downloaded studiomdl, but each time I tried to do anything at all - It would crash without warning - only saying "Studiomdl has stopped working".

I have tried installing it in various different places, primarily Steamapps/user/sourcesdk/bin/ep1/bin - this didn't work so I pretty much placed it in every single folder in sourcesdk to see if it would work but none of them do.

so Instead I looked for a different compiler, I found guistudiomdl, I managed to set the orangebox directory to sourcesdk/bin/orangebox/bin without any issues, but whenever I try to set the ep1 directory I get the message "Could not find gameconfig", skipping this message I then get another error message: "The game list could not be filled because the 'bin' path for this particular SDK has not been set yet." however I have set it multiple times, over and over again.

skipping that, I try to compile a qc file using orangebox, and I get printed with this message:

Created command line: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\wongp\sourcesdk\bin\orangebox\bin\studiomdl.exe" -game "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\wongp\garrysmod\garrysmod" -nop4 -nox360 C:\Users\Henry\Desktop\converted\mdldecompiler.qc

SteamStartup() failed: SteamStartup(0xf,0x0040F4F4) failed with error 1: failed to take master pipe connection lock

Would you (more experienced) guys be able to tell me what I'm doing wrong here, how I can fix this, or suggest a better compiler tool.

I followed several tutorials to fine detail in installing GUIstudiomdl, I also found another compiling tutorial by Rinfucks, he said that you should:

Set EP1 to source2009/bin
Set Orange Box to ep1/bin

however this just produced the same errors for me.

for clarification: I am trying to convert existing Garry's mod ragdolls into playermodels.

Thanks for any support! as someone new, trying to get into modelling and lua, this is really killing me.

edit:

I couldn't get EP1 to work, but I could get orangebox to work so I'm going to give up on EP1, I got rid of the steam error by launching sourcesdk in steam, then compiling, which I didn't realize was a neccecary step, but there you go.