SDK: My Hammer Editor Problem! Thread

Hello all!

I'm having a bit of an issue that's barring me from learning more about Hammer Editor, and modding as a whole. I've been learning about Hammer and SDK for a few weeks now, and I'm confident on moving forward with my mod plans and making an official HL2 mod page. However, before I can do that, there are a few more issues I need to iron out. Namely, the problem with Hammer Editor being opened through the SDK menu.

Here's how it starts:
1. I open up SDK from the Tools menu in Steam. That works fine, and it loads up correctly.

2. Then, I create a mod file and go through that process correctly as well. No problems so far.

3. I try to open up Hammer Editor...and that loads up correctly.

4. I click on File-->New, but then I get this error: "Failed to load the default scheme file. The map views may be missing some visual elements." And that's when I see this:

All the visual elements are just flat-out gone! I thought it was just the various settings that needed fixing, but I can't seem to make any changes to it once-so-ever. It's just stuck like this no matter what settings I mess with.

No matter how long and hard I've searched, it seems that I can not solve the problem of loading Hammer Editor through SDK.

However, I am able to bypass all this by going to Hammer Editor directly in the HL2 bin folder and launching it that way. Hammer Editor has been able to load correctly, and I've been using it successfully. There's no sign of this "Black Screen of Doom" that I seem to be met with now.

The reason I want to fix this is because I don't know how to load custom content into the map I'm working on, nor do I know how to put each file associated with the map into their respective folders (if I can find a tutorial, then that'd be great). It's just so much easier to put them into the created mod folder and work from there as a project. However, I can't do that if I can't load Hammer Editor through SDK...unless there is a way to load the project or mod folder through the independently launched Hammer Editor instead of SDK.

If anyone has a solution to this, or a work around, then I'd appreciate the help! This has stumped me for the past week, and all the Googling in the world hasn't come up with much of a solution or fix.

Thanks for your time, ladies and gents!