Tuesday, July 22, 2008

AutoCAD 2008 LT slow pull down menus

I had to see this to believe it. AutoCAD 2008 LT had a weird problem when a user on a particular computer was clicking any of the pull down menus. It was taking like 1 minute to expand it.

“For crying out loud”, I thought, “what next? What else will make my life difficult?”. It seemed that Autodesk brings out every year a bit more crappier and buggy programs. I had to solve this one too. And it wasn’t easy let me tell you. I had my user nagging me to death over it! I couldn’t take it any longer!

But suddenly……. a post in one of the Autodesk forums (not for the LT version) helped me out. I needed to do the following:

1) go to the directory that the executable was (eg acadlt.exe)

2) Open notepad and create an empty file called acadlt.dll (the same name as the executable but with the .dll at the end.) For those who do not know how to create an empty file with different extension with notepad, don’t type anything and enclose your file name with brackets.eg: “acadlt.dll”

Apparently sometimes AutoCAD needs to read that file FIRST before revert to the normal file that contains some-short-of-information-about-the-pull-down-menus (AKA I can't remember the technical specs).

3) Save it.

And voila! After a restart of AutoCAD, the annoying error went away. God damn it! A great thank you to all the people that take time to contribute in the Autodesk forums. Thank you for saving my mental health. (I saw you there, stop saying “which mental health” YOU ARE NOT HELPING!)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had this sme issue with '06. After a lame response form my IT/CAD people I found this. What I found though is I had to place a dummy dll in the same folder as the cui file that cad loads. I did the same for the express menu also. Instant results!

Unknown said...

Thanks for this, it worked for AutoCAD 2008 too.

I also lost some mental sanity with Autodesk lately...

Yai hq said...

It's so fast now! Thank you!!! :) (AutoCAD LT 2008)

Anonymous said...

Okay, so what worked for me was that will some users with roaming profiles, the main customization file was located on the network server - bringing this local solved the issue.
Thanks to all the pointer from previous posts...