FATAL ERROR: Unhandled Access Violation

[noah]

Of course it's deadline time and I'm making a couple of edits to a drawing that hasn't been touched in a few months. I'm almost done with the edits and then I go to switch drawing tabs and bam!! FATAL Error.

I do get an opportunity to save. But what good is this? I just saved a corrupt file over my last good copy - duh! That was stupid.

I could go to a backup file but that won't have any of the final edits I just made. I'm hoping I can fix this file.

Anyway, I've tried opening on a different machine - same error when switching drawing tabs. No other command seems to give the error just switching tabs.

i tried purge and audit - no luck.

I tried wblock of entire drawing and then recover.

I tried saving as DXF.

Right before this happened my computer was slowing down to a crawl when working in AutoCAD or anything really. So, I decided to shutdown to clear everything out. The FATAL ERROR occured within a few minutes of starting back up and resuming work on that file.

I just ran a full virus scan and have found 6 so far. Trojan Horses and a W32.SillyFDC all in my documents and settings photoshop plugins folder. These apparently have been there for a very long time as I haven't downloaded any phtooshop plugins for nearly a year.

Hopefully cleaning these will fix the problem but I'm not convinced - why woudl a photoshop virus effect this 1 cad file and why now? I open and close dozens of cad files everyday as do my co-workers. And this one currupt file has the same fatal error on different machines. Seems like it is the file, not a virus on my machine. Hopefully I'm wrong.

Anyway, has anyway successfully recovered a file with a similar situation?

Thanks!

[tracy.findlater]

I've never known what causes these unhandled access violations. I'd create a completely new drawing if I were you. Are you using xrefs? Reattach whatever you can in the new drawing, create new viewports etc, then maybe try copy/paste anything else you need instead of Wblock.

Also check your scale list, that makes drawing run really slow; type in -SCALELISTEDIT and reset to default.

Good luck!

Oh did you look for an autosave?