Mysterious Masking taking place

[demilio]

I have a user with the following problem:

An employee that no longer works at my company has some sort of mask in a drawing that I can't figure out. There is no object in model space or paper space; the drawing looks normal until it is plotted and there is an area of a circle that will NOT plot. Does anyone know what the problem is?

There are no mask block definitions in the drawing and there is also no text masks. I think they masked behind the circle of a section mark so the objects behind would not show up. The section mark is in paper space the masked drawing is model space. The mask is taking place on top of (or within) a viewport.

Please Help

[mjfarrell]

I would love to see that file..
I love good mystery

[Mike.Perry]

Hi

Take a look at things like 3D Faces, Regions etc

Has the Floating Viewport(s) got HidePlot set?

OR

As Michael suggested post the drawing file here so we can take a look.

Have a good one, Mike

[Coolmo]

We've had that problem in our office through the years and it all goes back to one file, WIPEOUT.ARX. We use to get the same problem where a solid or doughnut or just a pline with width would look perfect on screen but then it would plot out all goofy with random pieces missing. We also had huge black squares plotting EVERYWHERE on our plans when nothing existed in the drawing at that spot. We don't even use the wipeout command or any kind of text masking but the problem still shows up. I guess because WIPEOUT.ARX is loading everytime the error still exists.

Our solution: We simply erase WIPEOUT.ARX everywhere on our computers or rename it to something else so AutoCAD can't find it. If you're getting these strange problems, I can almost guarantee that it's the wipeout.arx file. Try renaming it (so you can still save the file), reload AutoCAD and plot the same drawing to see what happens.

By the way, this problem seems to work (for lack of a better term) like a virus. The error might not ever occur but when it does, nothing fixes it that I've found and it will continue to happen forever. Even copying a new wipeout.arx out of the box doesn't fix it, only getting rid of it does.

[mjfarrell]

This might be a better option than deleting or renaming that ARX file:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/item?siteID=123112&id=2861883&linkID=2475323