I know this is an old post, but I am having the exact problem. I also have a student version of Wildfire 4.0, and when I open the sketcher palette, it is blank. There are no tabs, shapes, or anything. There is no "sketcher_palette" folder within my wildfire\text folder, and when I search my computer for "sketcher_palette", the only results are htm files that appear to be help files. Would it be a fair assumption that the student version does not have an existing sketcher palette? If so, would there be any way that one could get a base palette converted to the student version? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Steve