AutoCAD 2009 RSS Feeds bug in InfoCenter

Notice that the RSS Feed for AutoCAD 2009 forum or discussion group is not the correct one. It points to the one fro AutoCAD 2008.
http://www.autodesk.com/rss-autocad2008forums

It should be http://discussion.autodesk.com/rss/rssmessages.jspa?forumID=344

EXCEL.EXE is not a valid Win32 application

If you get an message box with this warning when trying to start Microsoft Office Excel try to restart the computer. This is what has helped for me. Not sure about the reason that this happens though.

If trying to run EXCEL.EXE directly:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE is not a valid Win32 application."

If trying to start with an Excel shortcut:

"This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel."

This happened with Excel 2007 and Vista SP1.

Survey companion error [1.5.-5] - separate license files needed

Separate license file are needed if you want network licenses work in some unique cases even though you usually can combine different license files from the same vendor.

You have to fill out a Request Previous Versions in Subscription Administration under Manage License Benefits Use. Basically you request a new serial number for the survey 2006 companion from the CIV3D 2009 group.

Here is a user case (credit to Mike Caldwell) when this was needed and solved the issue.

We upgraded our license files to 2009 for CIV3D and AutoCAD but we are going to use 2006 products for a little longer until we test 2009. So now we are using LDD 2006 and we have a few of or survey guys needing to use the survey companion which in 2006 needed it's own license file. The autodesk people say it shouldn't need it's own file and will use 2009 to gets it's license. My question is do you know what serial number I should insert into the survey network deployment in order for it to see the license?

The following is an excerpt from autodesk.

As you may or may not know, Land Desktop Companion will pull a Civil 3D license if no Land Desktop license is available.  However, for the 2009 products, there is no such thing as Survey.  The functionality that was in Survey has been wrapped into Land Desktop Companion.  That being said, you will still need to have your Survey 2006 license increment in your license file to run Survey 2006.

AutoCAD Scale List Cleanup Utility cleans up existing DWG's

Even though some of the problems with _XREF_XREF where fixed partly with AutoCAD 2008 SP1 and AutoCAD 2009 you will need this tool to fix existing drawings that has performance problems because of the scale list problem.

This free tool can also be used to apply scales from a template on a bunch of drawings.

Download: Scale List Cleanup Utility

See also Between the Lines

Previous blog posts about annotation scales:
Annotation scaling and annotation scale list in AutoCAD 2008
AutoCAD 2008 and Annotation Scale template
Slow AutoCAD startup or performance

AutoCAD crashes while saving, closing or plotting a drawing

This issue can occur when the Drawing Tabs Utility is loaded that I've written about recently. Obviously the good comes with some bad.

Knowledge Base document: AutoCAD crashes while saving, closing or plotting a drawing

FLEXnet limitation with many distributed servers

This might be useful for others with many distributed FLEXnet license servers.

Chris Dodge at Microdesk shared the following with me:

Just ran across something interesting with a large client -  Have you heard of this?

They had recently been having a problem where their "Suite" Autodesk products like Land Desktop companion and some of the Revit products could not get a license.    But "Regular" products such as Civil 3D 2008 and Acad MEP had no trouble.

Of course I checked and double checked PLIST – All was fine.

It WORKS if we set FLEXLM_LICENSE_FILE (registry and environment) to a SINGLE server.

The customer finally figured out that the problem started happening when they added a few more FLEXLM servers in the company….

They have a total of 17 servers – He counted the number of characters in his "@server1;@server2…" string, and found that products that need to "CASCADE" for their license don’t seem to like a server list that is over 128 characters.

PS. JTB FlexReport has no limitations on the amount of servers it can report license statistics on.

AutoCAD going invisible?

Here is what it look like for me using AutoCAD 2009 and Windows Vista.
Can you see the windows title text?

Can you see the InfoCenter Search text in below?

When maximized I can see it or if the background is darker.

AutoCAD 2008 was much better as you can see.

      

How will AutoCAD 2010 look like? Invisible? Hope not.

Here is a comment I got by email: "It doesn't change even you do change the window settings! Every new version of AutoCad gets worse!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Excel document version created in year 1601

I had one of the rare crashes of Vista and when I fired up Excel next time I notice that the original had this information. Version created last time the user saved the file 1:00 am January 1, 1601". That was some hundred years ago. Call it the Year 1601 bug.

Solve uninstall problems with Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

If you fail to install any program this utility can come handy. It is one of the tools you should know about and use in emergency situations. It can be used even with Autodesk products like AutoCAD.

Once you have removed the application using the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility, it is strongly recommended that you follow the steps in solution TS45252 to remove other Autodesk applications and clean up any folders or registry keys left behind.

Download and instructions on Microsoft.com and Autodesk Knowledge Base document: Product uninstall from the Control Panel fails

Solution to Outlook.exe keep running after exit

For some time I've run into the problem that Outlook 2007 is not closed fully. The application is no longer visible but the process keeps running as can be seen in Task Manager. It is normal that it can take a few seconds up to some minutes but now it never stops running. And if an email comes during this time I got notified about it and can open that email. If I try to start Outlook it shows the application using the same Outlook.exe process. This happens on Vista SP1 and might happen on other Windows versions as well.

The solution in my case was that I found Skype (version 3.6) locking up Outlook because it was set to "Show Outlook Contacts" in the View menu. When I disabled that option Outlook closed as it should.

 

One symptom I have seen is that I get the notification that "A data file did not close properly the last time it was used as is being checked for problems. Performance might be affected while the check is in progress."

Another is this message when starting Outlook could be "Outlook failed to start correctly last time. Starting Outlook in safe mode will help you correct or isolate the startup problem in order to successfully start the program. Some functionality may be disabled in this mode. Do you want to start Outlook in safe mode?"

Then "Data file check in process" can be seen for quite a while.

Some other tips if this happens are to check the consistency of the PST files using SCANPST.EXE. Check also for other applications that might connect to Outlook or access the PST files like Google Desktop. Antivirus programs could also be the cause of the locks.

If nothing else works you can try to select "Perform an automatic sen/receive when exiting." in Options>Send/Receive...

Solve problem with AutoCAD 2009 Help Search

If you find that your Search tab in AutoCAD 2009 Help is broken it can be fixed by running a repair of AutoCAD. One reason why this can happen is if you install AutoCAD 2009 and after that AutoCAD 2008.

This is what it should look like.

If you know a quicker way to repair this make a comment on how.

Acrobat PDFMaker 8.0 toolbar in AutoCAD 2009 and CUI bugs

If you want the Acrobat PDFMaker 8.0 toolbar in AutoCAD 2008 or AutoCAD 2009 here is how you can do it. It requires that you have Adobe Acrobat 8.0.

With some work I achieved this result and unfortunately it was not because CUI was so stable and easy to use. But it is also AutoCAD Ribbon version 1 so hopefully this works better after some hotfixes, service packs or at least in AutoCAD 2010.

As a starter use the APPLOAD command. Click on Startup Suit Contents and add "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 8.0\PDFMaker\AutoCAD\2007\PDFMAcad.arx".

It should then look like this on the command line:
Command: appload
PDFMAcad.arx was added to the Startup Suite.

This created some menu files and images in this folder on my PC:
C:\Users\<user>\appdata\roaming\adobe\acrobat\8.0\ACAD-7001-409

In AutoCAD 2009 it will look this this with the Acrobat PDFMaker 8.0 toolbar loaded.

Now I want to move the toolbar to the Ribbon.

Run the CUI command. Select pdfmacad.cui.

Right-click on the toolbar Acrobat PDFMaker 8.0.

Right-click on Ribbons Tabs and add a new tab named "PDF".

Drag and drop the ribbon panel that was created into the PDF tab.

 

Click on Apply.

Select All Customization Files and click on the current workspace and you find that you see the right pane change.

 

Select pdfmacad.cui again. Here you should be able to click on Customize Workspace on the right pane but I got an error. Instead expand Ribbons Tab on the left side so you see "PDF". Drag and drop that one to the right side on the Ribbons Tab there.

 

Looking in CUI two panels are listed. One is unnamed that obviously just creates an empty panel and cannot be deleted. Another bug.

The workaround was to click on it and set the Show property to No.

Now I want to make the icons side by side and add some text below.

I try to drag the command on Row 2 to Row 1 but nothing happens. Another bug as I can drag the command from Row 1 down to Row 2.

After deleting Row 1 and showing the text it look like this.

But I don't want a separate Tab. I would like to move it to the Output tab.

I tried different methods like transferring the panels between the cui files but even though it looked right in CUI the result was just an empty panel on the Ribbon tab. Buggy again.

I even tried another approach.but was not able to get it to work because of several bugs in CUI.

Right click on the toolbar and select Customize.

In Customize User Interface (CUI) expand "Customizations in All CUI Files" and the right part of CUI by clicking on the black arrow at the bottom.

Click on the command "Convert to Adobe PDF" so you see the Button Image.

Click on Edit and in the next dialog box click on Save As and place the image where you can find it later. Do the same with the command "Convert to Adobe PDF and Send for Review". Notice that if you in the button image editor click on Save As the first time you end up in you Documents folder. If you cancel it and click again you end up in the Icons folder. Bug again.

One location could be something like this if you have Windows Vista:
C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2009\R17.2\enu\Support\Icons

Click OK to make sure things are saved and that the next step will work. If not you will get the menu file corrupted in the following steps due to some bug.

Start CUI again by right clicking on the toolbar like before and expand the panes.

Now right click on "Acrobat PDFMaker 8.0" as seen below and select "Copy To Ribbon Panels".

Now the Ribbon Panel "Acrobat PDFMaker 8.0" is available.

Right click on it and select Copy.

Navigate now to the Ribbon Tabs and locate Output -2D and select it. Right click and select Paste.

Bummer. It didn't work either. To achieve the best result you should create the Ribbon Panel manually.

PUBLISHCOLLATE bugs in AutoCAD 2009

If PUBLISHCOLLATE is set to 0 it is not respected if you want a multi-page PDF using Page Setup Overrides in Sheet Set Manager using the the DWG To PDF.pc3.

An even more critical bug is this one in the PUBLISH command that also existed in AutoCAD 2008.

If PUBLISHCOLLATE is set to 1 and you create a multi-page PDF using DWG To PDF.pc3 I have found that in some cases characters are not plotted correctly. Example was an A that was missing the horizontal line, but only one of the A's on the drawing. Another example was that part of a character was missing on one of the pages but seen on the following page. After testing further it seems like it is the last object or partial object that end up on the following sheet. Workaround is to either plot to DWF and then plot the DWF to PDF or to plot to single page PDFs and then combine them.

This should be released as a hotfix as it cannot wait for SP1 and it should be fixed for AutoCAD 2008 as well because users might not be aware of the corrupt PDF files they are creating until it is too late.

Solution to problem to open images in Vista

Problem: I have an image on the desktop or some other folder and I cannot view it or open it. It does not matter if I double click on the icon or right click and select preview or "open with" and "Windows Photo Gallery". It doesn't matter if it is a jpg, bmp, png, gif or some other image file format I'm still unable to open the image. If I right click and edit the file it opens up in my image editor. File association works as I can open pictures in other locations. The problem is the same if I have a shortcut to an image. I have Windows Vista SP1 installed.

Solution: If any Internet shortcut has an URL with 260 characters or more you will find that you cannot open any picture file in that folder with Windows Photo Gallery. Right click on any shortcut and on the Web Document tab you find the URL. When you delete or move this shortcut to another folder it will work again. If you have hard to find the shortcut or shortcuts you can create a folder and move half of the shortcuts to that folder and then try to double click on the image again and that way isolate the problem.

Another tip that probably is the easiest one is to open Windows Explorer (press ÿ+E) and right click on any column header, click on "More..." and in the Choose Details dialog box check URL. Make the width of the column URL large so you easily can identify the long ones.

Notice the first Internet Shortcut's URL in the image below,

There is obviously a bug in Windows Photo Gallery and an alternative solution is to change the default application for viewing your photos.

Why does this happen? You browse the Internet and find a website, make a shortcut of it and place it on the desktop. It can be for "Google Image Result" after searching for some pics or something else. These links have often URLs with more than 259 characters. You can reproduce this by for example visiting this link (with 309 characters) and create a shortcut on the desktop: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.jtbworld.com/images/AutoCAD2007.png&imgrefurl=http://blog.jtbworld.com/2006_03_01_archive.html&h=586&w=811&sz=137&hl=en&start=2&um=1&tbnid=7EDzAAGQIGA_sM:&tbnh=104&tbnw=144&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dautocad%2Bsite:jtbworld.com%26as_st%3Dy%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

Vista SP1 installation problem 800704C8 and solution

SP1 is available for quite many now and I tried to install it but it failed with the error code 800704C8.

To isolate the I used MSCONFIG.

Disable all startup items and third party services when booting. This method will help to determine if this issue is caused by a loading program or service on computer startup. Perform the following steps:

1. Click the Start Button, type "msconfig" (without quotation marks) in the "Start Search" text box and then press ENTER.

2. Click the Services tab, check the "Hide all Microsoft services" box and click "Disable all" (if it is not gray).

3. Click the "Startup" tab and take note of the items that are checked and the items that are unchecked, as we will want to return your computer to this configuration when we finish troubleshooting. Once the checked items have been noted, click "Disable all".

4. Click OK to restart the computer.

If it still does not work there might be Microsoft services that you can try to disable.

In my case I found it was related to my previous post. When I disabled the Carbonite service I was able to install Vista SP1.

I reported the problem to Carbonite and got this reply:

Carbonite and other backup software use a Windows component called VSS (Virtual Shadow Service) to back up open or 'busy' files, but at times other applications on your system may be delaying Carbonite from accessing VSS, which in turn may delay the backup of your open files and cause an error with the Vista file copy feature. It uses the same VSS and the programs cannot use it at the same time. Disabling Carbonite while copying the file will allow you to use that feature.

What is interesting is that the problem I had described in that post where solved after SP1 was installed.

The Vista blog has more useful details.

Vista File copy Error 0x8007045D or Error 0x800704C8

Trying to install AutoCAD 2009 I get this error message: "The copy functions cannot be used.Failed to copy the following files: F:\x86\eula to C:\Users\JTB\AppData\Local\Temp\_AIA.tmp"

I tried then manually copy the files and instead got either of these messages:

An unexpected error is preventing the operation. Make a not of this error
code, which might be useful if you get additional help to resolve this
problem:

Error 0x800704C8: The requested operation cannot be performed on a file with a user-mapped section open.

Error 0x8007045D: The requested operation could not be performed because of an I/O
device error.

I tried the following and was able to install as well as copy the files after disabling Microsoft OneCare virus protection. Not sure if it was related or not or what made it work for sure.

• Goto computer properties > Advanced system settings > System protection tab.
• Uncheck all drives, hit apply.  This will turn of shadow copies and clear them.
• Reenable the drives, hit apply.  I then hit the create button to repopulate at least one shadow copy.

Update: It might have something to do with Carbonite backup as well. When I disabled their service and kept OneCare running I was able to have everything working normally. Solved with Vista SP1 as seen here.

FLEXnet issues when restarting the server or service

If and when you restart your FLEXnet/FLEXlm server or service it can be good to know that the status will be incorrect if lmutil.exe or lmtools.exe is used.

If the user has an application running and restarting the license server or just the license service the following can happen:

USER1 HOST1 HOST1 (v1.000) (HOST1/27000 103), start Sat 1/19 08:24

Restarting server or service and it will not pick up that a license actually still is in use and it will look like the license was checked out just after the server restart notice also how the license handle can change.

USER1 HOST1 HOST1 (v1.000) (HOST1/27000 101), start Sat 1/19 12:26

It affects the report like this one jtbflexreportHTML2.htm where used hours are showed and it is the same with borrowed licenses that you cannot fully rely on when the license was borrowed:

USER1@HOST1 Checked out license at 2007-04-28 06:33  Hours used: 2:52

Invalid display of polyline with negative thickness in AutoCAD

Nikolay Poleshchuk, an Autodesk Authorized Author, sent me this and I was able to reproduce the problem in AutoCAD 2009. You find the bug fully described here.

Document "drawing.dwg" has a command in progress.

Even though this Knowledge Base document Understanding the error " has a command in progress" says it only applies to AutoCAD 2000 and AutoCAD 2000i it can happen also in all later versions of AutoCAD even in AutoCAD 2009.

If you run into this problem you can find some helpful tips in that document. Sometimes when QSAVE does not work you can use SAVE or SAVEAS or click on the x  at the top right corner to either close the drawing or AutoCAD. I've seen this several times after using the 3dorbit command.

Document "<drive>:\<folder>\<filename>.dwg" has a command in progress.
Hit enter to cancel or [Retry]:

Google Blog Search problem to get complete result

A comparison on two searches and I found the following confirming that this Search Box for Blogger still is not good. The problem is probably not so much related to this Search Box (on the right side of this blog) but it's all Google and the blog search should really be fixed. Being one of the largest search companies Google should have fixed this a long time ago.
18 found using Google Search (the