Encountered an Improper Argument CRASH

[ctc]

I'm experiencing crashing of Revit 14 since sometime last week. It happens on both projects that were first started under 2013 and upgraded, and a project started on 2014, the former with my template and the latter with Revit's architecture template. Hardware acceleration has been disabled. Projects on Revit 13 do not experience this same problem.

Revit will work fine at times, and then if I right-click the mouse or click on any down arrow, the program will immediately close and there will be an Encountered an Improper Argument message. If I restart the program and open the file, this behavior will continue and it will crash immediately upon right clicking anywhere. Then, after 15 or 20 minutes, it will stop crashing. Any ideas would be appreciated.

I am allowing error reports to be sent to Autodesk for each crash.

[anna.oscarson]

Do you have the latest Update Release 1 installed?

[ctc]

Do you have the latest Update Release 1 installed?
Yes. Thanks.

[anna.oscarson]

Can you try to restore UIstate.dat on your machine? To do that Exit Revit, open Windows Explorer and browse to C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\Revit\Autodesk Revit 2014\, rename the file UiState.dat to UiState.bak. Start Revit and try the same thing again. Does it still crash when you right-click?

[ctc]

Can you try to restore UIstate.dat on your machine? To do that Exit Revit, open Windows Explorer and browse to C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\Revit\Autodesk Revit 2014\, rename the file UiState.dat to UiState.bak. Start Revit and try the same thing again. Does it still crash when you right-click?
It worked for a few hours, and then it began to crash again. I just renamed the file again, but this time it is crashing immediately.

[anna.oscarson]

Can you please send me a journal file from a session that crashed? (These can be found in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Autodesk\Revit\Autodesk Revit 2014\Journals)
Please send it to anna.oscarson@autodesk.com and I will take a look at it.

[akseidel428871]

Revit 2014 and possibly earlier versions will generate the "Encountered an Improper Argument" crash when it cannot properly parse the REVIT.ini text file at the moment it wants to write to the [Recent File List] the entry for the current file. So for example it tries to make sense out of the [Recent File List] just about when it is about to display a newly opened Revit file or when it is starting to save a new unnamed Revit file to some name. This last example results in a "Bad Schema" Revit file, so I guess the error must happen before the file is properly saved. You can reproduce the condition by renumbering the File1, File2 etc. entries in the .ini [Recent File List] section. The code in charge of the REVIT.INI file should be fixed to ride over a poorly formed [Recent File List] section. Knowing that such a problem can occur makes one wonder what other aspects of the Revit.ini file can result in the "Encountered an Improper Argument" crash for whatever reason in format or content.

Incidentally I do not think the journal file hints to the reason for this type of error.

So how can the REVIT.ini [Recent File List] section get out of whack? Easy, Revit does not seem to provide a way to edit the recent files list, which for many different reasons happens to be something one needs to do, and so something as removing FileN entries without renaming what remains results in the malformed [Recent File List] section.