Without A Net

Update 2 Released for AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT 2010

Autodesk has released Update 2 for AutoCAD 2010 and AutoCAD LT 2010. 32-bit and 64-bit versions of this update can be found at the following links:

AutoCAD 2010 Update 2
AutoCAD LT 2010 Update 2

This update is only for AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT and cannot be applied to vertical products that are based on AutoCAD 2010.

Update 2 is cumulative and includes all the fixes from Update 1. If you have not already installed Update 1, you do not need to install it before installing Update 2. If you are including service packs when creating a deployment, you will only see Update 2 as an option however both Update 1 and Update 2 are available for download separately, so if you only want Update 1 you can download it manually and include it in your deployment.

Installing Update 2 will increment the product version to 3, e.g., "AutoCAD 2010 - English Version 3".

Before installing Update 2, I strongly recommend you review the associated readme file for installation and deployment instructions, and details about the primary issues that are resolved by Update 2.

Note: If you also have AutoCAD 2011 or AutoCAD LT 2011 installed on your system, after uninstalling Update 1 or 2 for AutoCAD 2010 or AutoCAD LT 2010, you will need to repair your AutoCAD 2011 or AutoCAD LT 2011 installation. You should do this right after the Update is uninstalled to avoid issues in 2011.

Asian Character Input Hotfix For AutoCAD 2011

A new hotfix is available for AutoCAD 2011 that repairs a problem that causes Asian characters not to be entered in the command line window if Asian IME is used.

Asian Character Command Line Input Hotfix For AutoCAD 2011

The AutoCAD version of this hotfix can be applied to the following products:

• AutoCAD 2011
• AutoCAD Architecture 2011
• AutoCAD Electrical 2011
• AutoCAD Mechanical 2011
• AutoCAD MEP 2011

NOTE: Do not install this hotfix on AutoCAD Civil 3D® 2011 and AutoCAD Map 3D 2011 products. Those products have different versions of this hotfix.

Here is the AutoCAD LT 2011 version:

Asian Character Command Line Input Hotfix For AutoCAD LT 2011

As always, consult the readme file for installation instructions.

Recent Issues with NVIDIA Drivers

We've recently seen two separate types of issues, both related to the use of NVIDIA drivers in AutoCAD.

In the first issue, we found AutoCAD 2010 and AutoCAD 2010-based vertical products occasionally crashing while using MATCHPROP and a handful of other commands. This was traced back to the use of the NVIDIA Performance Driver.

In the second case, we have seen serious visual fidelity problems in AutoCAD 2011 when using the most recent AutoCAD 2011 OpenGL Performance Driver from NVIDIA. These issues can present themselves in one or more of the following ways:

• Incomplete or incorrect display of linetypes
• Incomplete display of the UCS icon
• 2D and 3D viewports not clipping correctly
• Incorrect object highlighting
• Gradients have lines showing through them
• Materials textures display as white objects
• Residual pixels left behind on display

In addition to these visual indications, you may also see that CPU usage is higher even when AutoCAD is idle.

NVIDIA has been made aware of these problems. Here are the technical solutions for both issues. The fix is the same for each: switch back to the Autodesk driver.

Fatal errors in AutoCAD using the NVIDIA Performance Driver

Visual Fidelity Issues with NVIDIA OpenGL Driver

Changes to AutoCAD 2011 Help

In case you haven't noticed already, there has been a change to the help documentation in AutoCAD 2011. In previous releases, the help was provided using Compiled HTML (CHM) files and looked something like this:

AutoCAD 2011 now uses an HTML-based help system instead of the CHM files and, by default, a request for help retrieves help content from an online Autodesk location. These help files are also installed in your local AutoCAD installation folder structure and you can force AutoCAD to retrieve help locally instead of pulling from the online location. This is especially good to know when using AutoCAD 2011 on a computer that has no (or restricted) Internet access.

You can change AutoCAD 2011 to use the locally-installed help by changing an option on the System tab of the Options dialog.

For more information, you can reference the following technical solution:
Switching to locally-installed help for AutoCAD 2011

Having the help available online has a few advantages:

First, you always have access to the help whether you have AutoCAD installed on your local machine or not. You can read the full AutoCAD 2011 help just by going to http://docs.autodesk.com/ACD/2011/ENU/landing.html.

Second, if you provide AutoCAD support you are likely accustomed to directing people to certain locations in the help docs to find specific topics. This is now a little easier because you can provide a URL directly to the topic.

Let's say I wanted to point someone to the topic that explains a distributed license server model.

In AutoCAD 2010, I'd have to tell them to open the Autodesk Network Licensing Guide (adsk_nlg.chm), expand "Plan Your Network Licensing", expand "Plan Your License Server Configuration", and select "Distributed License Server Model".

In AutoCAD 2011, I can simply send them the URL to that specific topic:
Distributed License Server Model

AutoCAD Crashes Caused by Old Adobe Flash Player

We've been receiving reports of crashes in a variety of Autodesk products (and versions) while using the help system or while viewing videos (such as in the New Feature Workshop). We have traced the source of these crashes and found them to be caused by having an older version (or corrupted installation) of the Adobe Flash Player on user systems.

In some cases, these Flash-related crashes can happen while using functions in an Autodesk product that are totally unrelated to Flash. What happens is that Flash is initializing in the background and then causes a crash in the middle of some command giving the illusion that the crash is related to the command in use at the time.

In these cases, uninstalling the older version of Flash and then reinstalling a current version from the Adobe website should address the problem. You can get more information in the following solution:

Crash in Autodesk products caused by old version of the Adobe Flash Player

On a side note ...

This another perfect example of why you should always send in those CER reports when a product crashes and give us as much detail as possible on what you were doing when the crash occurred. Not only can we use that information to track down problems like this but, if you also provide your email, we can round-trip that information back to you when there are fixes or work-arounds.

AutoCAD Crash Caused by Odd Registry Value

In the past, we've seen issues where you would launch AutoCAD and it would immediately close with a CER dialog and possibly the message:

"This version of AutoCAD was not installed properly and some features may not run correctly. You should reinstall AutoCAD immediately to make sure all features are working properly. Do you wish to continue anyway?"

This often points to a corruption in the .NET Framework but we recently discovered a cause that was a bit more unusual.

It turns out that one source for this kind of crash stems from a bad registry entry in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.png key. There have been user-reported cases where the value in the Content Type key contains a leading space:

In cases where someone had that leading space in the value, simply removing it resolved the crash.

We don't know how that particular registry value is getting set with a leading space but it isn't being done by Autodesk. Since that it just too odd for someone to be manually editing, I expect it is being done by some other application.

For more details, see the following Technical Solution:

Error on startup or AutoCAD is not installed properly. Please reinstall immediately.