Missing C3D Icons in Menus

[m.vanitallie]

I was setting up a cui and profile for our office and I have lost the location of the C3D icons in the menus.

See attached screen shot of clouded question marks where the Feature line toolbar is.

I changed the location of "custom icon location" but didn't think this would affect the vanilla C3D.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

[wag24]

Try entering "ShowTS" in the command line.

[randyc]

Civil 3D requires a .dll file for its icons. This file must be located in the same folder that Civil.cui is located in. If both of these files are currently in the same folder and you are still having this issue, then you need to delete your Civil.mnr file, this will force AutoCAD to rebuild the interface based on the current "Main" cui (this is the top most CUI in the CUI editor or the CUI listed in the Options dialog>Files tab>Customization Files>Main Customization File).

If for some reason you have renamed your Civil.cui, or created your own and transfered over the Civil commands, then you will need to copy the original Civil.dll file and rename it to match your current CUI. Again, you will probably need to delete any associated MNR files to update any toolbars/menus/etc.

Hope this helps.

[brainman1000]

When you are messing with the cui, I have found it best practice to leave all of the default cui's alone and create a new one that you can load in the cui manager. This way things like that dont happen.

[randyc]

The real problem here is that Civil 3D requires civil.cui and civil.dll in order to maintain access to the Civil utilities their associated icons. I have found from experience that most users find the default Workspaces in Civil 3D to be somewhat lacking in overall day-to-day functionality. This leads users to resort to customizing, which usually leads to the problems brainman1000 indicated.
How I overcame this was to just create a blank CUI and populate it with all the popular and custom Workspaces that our office uses on a day-to-day basis (this became our Enterprise CUI). I attached all the default CUI’s that come stock with Civil 3D (to include civil.cui) and all our custom CUI’s as “Partial Loaded”. I copied and renamed the civil.dll to match our Enterprise CUI as well; this allows access to all the icons in Civil 3D. When we deployed Civil 3D we performed a Network Deployment and along with the “Enterprise” CUI I had the “Main” CUI set as “Custom” (custom.cui), which is one of the default CUI’s loaded during installation, so each user already has it in their profile. As custom.cui is blank and exclusive to each user, the users may populate it with whatever they want and not affect other users.
My example uses an Enterprise environment, but this concept could easily be used in a “stand alone” environment as well; just attach your custom created CUI as the “Main” CUI (not to be confused with custom.cui, there’s no real reason to use custom.cui in a “stand alone” environment) and don’t attach anything as your “Enterprise” CUI. This way you can make whatever changes you want to your custom CUI without affecting any of the default loaded CUI’s.
One word of caution, choose your Partial Loaded CUI order well, as this affects your context menus and your shortcut menus. I had to eventually create my own shortcut menus in our Enterprise CUI, as no one was happy with having access to only one set; half my users wanted the Civil 3D shortcut menu set, and the other half wanted the stock AutoCAD shortcut menus.

[civil3Dguide]

I had a user who had his icons on some of his toolbars scrambled today, the commands were in the right place, but the images were mixed up. I tried to figure out the problem, tried erasing the earlier mentioned file, but still mixed icons remained. Then another cad guy tried pulling a new command onto one of the mixed up toolbars and just like that they all fixed, it left me confused as to how or why it fixed it, and how that even worked. I still don't understand it!

Yesterday the same station had lost half of the commands in the drop-down menus, I had to uninstall and reinstall Civil to fix it.

Does anyone know what may be happening to this machine?

[randyc]

Were the icons for Civil 3D commands or standard AutoCAD commands? My thought process is that maybe Civil 3D failed to read the civil.dll file correctly (or it was corrupt), and when your coworker added the additional command, it forced Civil to rebuild the civil.dll, thus fixing the problem. Just one remote possibility.

Other alternatives are a corrupt CUI file, or both a corrupt CUI and associated DLL file, or a corrupt AutoCAD profile. I've had the latter happen to me several times when we first installed Civil 3D (SP1).

[civil3Dguide]

Standard AutoCAD commands as far as I know, we didn't check them all, and thinking about it I don't think he has any civil toolbars loaded, as he is new to the software.

But the missing commands from the menus yesterday were civil commands.

I was thinking I should have deleted the contents of the support folder yesterday before reinstalling as some files were left behind, but I figured that the reinstall would over write them.

I can't remember what files stayed behind yesterday, but I was thinking that it may have been a dll file or combination causing the problems.

[randyc]

My money would be on a corrupt DLL or other resource file, that to me, is the only thing that would explain the sudden "magical" fix when a new command was applied, which forced AutoCAD to rebuild or reload the icon library file. This, of course, is just an educated guess and I could be miles off the mark.

[civil3Dguide]

Thanks, for your thoughts on this, maybe I can quit thinking about it now.

[randyc]

I know exactly what you mean :lol:. Have a good one. :beer:

[MHultgren]

What Antivirus program are you running. I have seen a couple scramble the dlls (or completely delete them) if they were not set to be ignored.

[civil3Dguide]

The firm that I was working at that day had recently, within the past month or so, switched to AVG.

[MHultgren]

Was that the same release that corrupted some of Microsoft's files? At least in AVG you can go into the control panel and tell it to ignore certain folders completely.

That is what we use (and I use at home too) I have had to set some directories to be ignored to keep from having this happen. Seems some AV programs see ARX files as Worms or Trojans too.

[civil3Dguide]

I don't know if it's the same release, I would have to inquire with the IT guy at the firm.

It's seems to make some since though, I hadn't thought about it, I just kept looking in the other direction, like how did a virus get in, and was waiting to hear about the entire work station crashing out.:roll: