"Crash Friday" began with...
- "My ACA Project crashed when I opened an element"
- Then another user "I can't open a construct either"
- Then from a MEP user "All the projects are broken"
First thing is to test it yourself so I opened a project which had been working earlier in the day with this result:
Things had been fine until about 10:30am so what might have changed?
- We've had lots of Windows updates over the past few days.... maybe?
- New Anti-Virus Definitions... maybe?
- Something happening to servers/network/environment... maybe?
- A corrupt AutoCAD Architecture Project .apj file... one project possibly but all?
I used my "Stupid question of the day" quota to ask the eternally helpful resident network guru if anything special happened on the network today:
"There was a DHCP change, but that shouldn't be a problem..."
I did find DHCP Errors logged at about that time on more than one machine and it's impacting everyone, both AutoCAD Architecture & MEP, so time to investigate.
Maybe it's a network thing?
Fire up SysInterals Tools to see what is happening during the crash. At least it's predictable, easy to repeat, which is preferable to the dreaded intermittent error. I noticed the file seemed to open (could see model space graphics) but after that the AV and network connection polling went off the scale as some AutoCAD related components tried to run. In AutoCAD Architecture & MEP the Projects Standards mechanism kicks in at this stage and updates the file content to match the master files.
Project Standards was the clue!
A normal File>Open loaded the same file without error but it doesn't trigger the Project Standards check. I disabled Projects Standards, common to all projects here, on one project and things worked normally.
An audit of the Standard Master files found an error. It appeared ACA crashed while either accessing or updating one of the files leaving one with a few mangled property sets:
Auditing Entities Pass 1
Pass 1 78500 objects auditedSchedule Table Style (Property Set Definition)
eNullObjectId Will Erase
Pass 1 78800 objects auditedAecScheduleData Object (Property Set Definition)
eNullObjectId Will Erase
AecScheduleData Object (Property Set Definition)
eNullObjectId Will Erase
Pass 1 92700 objects audited
Auditing Entities Pass 2
Pass 2 92700 objects audited
Auditing Blocks 1200 Blocks audited
Total errors found 16 fixed 16
The resulting corruption meant anyone opening any part of a Project hit that error and then it was end of play! Audit and repairing the file stopped the fatal errors. Time to add it to my "Fixes & Bugs" reference map and get a coffee!
