If you noticed that in the „materiallibraries“ folder the material library 3dsmax.mat is missing after you installed 3DsMax 2012 or 3DsMax 2012 Design you can download a fix from Autodesk webpage. To fix the problem just go to autodesk webpage and download the missing library and move to your 3DsMax 2012 folder. For example, C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max Design 2012\materiallibraries. After this restart your 3DsMax if it was running and the problem should be solved.
Autodesk also provided a tutorial to fix this issue on network deployments.
Source and full article: Autodesk