Live Update and 64-bit IE8

Greetings from Germany. I'm here in Munich to deliver training at Autodesk Industry Academy 2009. This is the first time Autodesk Product Support has put on an event of this magnitude and it's designed specifically to train our channel partners on the latest troubleshooting and problem solving techniques that we are using. I will be giving training on installation and licensing and will cover some of the basics like cascade licensing and creating deployments, as well as highlighting some of the changes in the 2010 products. It has been 18 years since I last visited Germany and I'm looking forward to spending the week here (being a Stoeckel and all).

I want to let you know about an issue with Internet Explorer 8 that causes the AutoCAD Live Update to fail on 64-bit systems.  When installing on a 64-bit system, Microsoft installs both the x86 and x64 versions of IE8 but makes the x86 version the system default.  Microsoft sets the 32-bit version as the default because there are still many plugins that don't work in 64-bit (Flash being one of the big ones). When you run Live Update to install service packs, it uses the system default browser so it ends up invoking the x86 IE8 even though it is running on an x64 system with an x64 AutoCAD.  Since the x86 IE8 can’t launch our x64 ActiveX DLLs, the operation fails with the following message:

"The Communication Center was unable to apply the Live Update service pack. Please restart your computer, launch your application and click the Live Update link in Communication Center."

At this point, the only workaround is to roll back to IE7 or manually download and install the service packs; restarting your computer will not fix the problem.  Remember, this only affects 64-bit systems. Unless Microsoft makes a change and allows the x64 version of IE8 to be the default browser on 64-bit systems, I expect the fix for this will require us to modify the Communication Center so that it explicitly invokes the x64 IE8 instead of using the system default.  I'll keep you posted on any changes around this issue.