I downloaded a scene file from an artist and was dissecting it, was pulling my hair out trying to recreate the effect of a glossy material where the main texture was created by an image in the roughness channel. No matter what image I loaded from my usual textures folder (not the C4D default tex folder) I was not getting any results, like it would go from nice to completely flat. Yet whenever I loaded the projects' included image file the results were immaculate. I thought maybe because the file was black and white? Maybe it was a tiff and mine was a jpg? I went down this troubleshooting rabbit hole for a while before I finally tracked it down to this weird inconsistency- the images I was trying to load were all located within folders I had specified in my C4D preferences as "Texture Paths". I deleted all these folder paths and restarted Cinema. All the same files worked fine. Then I investigated further- seeing if it made a difference how I responded to the C4D prompt to "copy texture to project folder" or whatever it always asks you, no matter whether I chose yes or no, the texture would work, but if C4D never had to ask (bc of pref settings) it wouldn't work.
Windows 10, GTX 980, 32GB RAM... some other stuff