AutoCAD 2005 writing to network and crashing

[mattf]

I am currently upgrading from 2002 to 2005. I am using a custom menu that I am menuloading on top of the standard acad menu. My custom menu resides on a network drive that my users have read only access to so that they can't modify those custom toolbars. When I load this menu, my users machines are trying to write to the directory that my custom menu resides. When we gave them write access to the drive 2005 actually created the directory string (O:\Documents and Settings\stevea\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2005\R16.1\enu). It seems odd that 2005 is trying to create such a directory structure since it should have no reason to do this. I am completely lost in what is going on. It would appear that this happening is one of the root causes to my users machines crashing nearly everytime they close a group of drawings. One other note, I currently have a users machine that doesn't crash when closing, but he doesn't have the express tools installed and has never had 2005's SP1 installed. Has anyone had any experience with these causeing problems?

[RobertB]

Someone with write permissions to the network location needs to recompile the menu. 2002 and 2004/5 menus are not compatible. If you need to support both versions of AutoCAD for a while, you need to place the 2005 menu files in another location before compiling. And remove the menu location from the search path if possible (as long as the icons can still be found on the search path). Otherwise, you may inadvertanly compile the wrong menu.

[mattf]

So is there anyway to have a menu that the users can recompile locally that will look for updates on the network? My quandary is that when I make changes to the menu I don't want to have to manually reload it on each users local machine so that they can recompile it, so that's why I wanted to network it, but I need to keep them from changing the menu. When I am menu-loading the menu I am loading the mnc file, should I be using the mnu or mns possibly to make this work? Also you wrote "And remove the menu location from the search path if possible (as long as the icons can still be found on the search path)." Are you saying to remove the path to where the menu is completely from the support files search path? When I don't have that directory pathed I loose all of the bmp images for the macros. Thank you very much for your help so far.

[Mike.Perry]

Hi

Have a browse of the following threads -

AutoCAD 2004 menus will corrupt 2000i menu file

Shared menus on network

Auto Loading MNS files

+

A search of the Forums should turn-up some more useful information on this very subject -

Search Forums

Have a good one, Mike

[mattf]

Thanks for the links. They have great info. Do you have any thoughts on the user machine trying to write to the network and recreating the directory structure on the network like the local directory strucuter? Have you ever ran across the crashing issue that I am having? The menu item and the crashing may be two completely seperate items, but at this point I don't know if they are linked or not.

[Mike.Perry]

Do you have any thoughts on the user machine trying to write to the network and recreating the directory structure on the network like the local directory strucuter?

No, have never come across that one before.... if you followed the links I provided you would've seen that I like to keep things as simple as possible ie Central Network location(s) that User's haven't got write permission to + Each User has their very own Network location where they're free to do as they please.

Have you ever ran across the crashing issue that I am having?

No.

The menu item and the crashing may be two completely seperate items, but at this point I don't know if they are linked or not.

That is were detective work on your part comes into play.... Check out the following thread (the bit of interest is the snippet from Ed Jobe) -

Red AutoSNAP marker

Hopefully Ed's little guide will get you looking / thinking in the right direction.

Have a good one, Mike