Slow creation of Network Deployments for AutoCAD and other Autodesk Products?
Ok, here's the final word on why it takes so long to create Network Deployments using AutoCAD's deployment tool...for 2006 through 2010 and most likely beyond:
You absolutelymust turn your antivirus OFF before creating a deployment.
Failure to do so will cause your deployment to take more than 10 or even 20 hours and may ultimately crash anyway.
This is especially true for Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition (and later).
On a reasonably fast Dual-Core machine, deployments should take no longer than 15 minutes.
Also, be careful to note that on your LAN, the Administrative Tools for Symantec Antivirus has a feature to turn Auto-Protect back on automatically after XX number of minutes. If this feature is used, you must go to the AV server, disable this feature, and then from the workstation where you create the deployments, dissable your Auto-Protect.
Make sure to return all AV settings to their original settings on both the workstation and server after creating your depolyments.
Procedures for other makes of antivirus products will vary.
Good luck to all who have suffered (as I have) with this horrible time wasting discovery.
For some reason, Autodesk seems to hide the solution to this issue. Sure, they do advise that you turn your antivirus off, but frankly, I rarely do because in 22 years of installing and supporting AutoCAD and Autodesk products, I've never, ever seen any issues arrise when installing them with antivirus enabled. And local installations do not suffer at all even now.
Only Autodesk's Network Deployments since about the 2006 product release seem to be affected.
This tip will be posted on several AutoCAD Users Groups and should be easy to find in a google search.