I appreciate all the feedback so far but I am still mystified but what is going on. I am attaching a new example of what I am talking about.
1. We hire an outside firm to prepare a survey for us. They then send us there CAD file. Once we receive that we do not touch that file at all. It simple gets referenced into our drawings and we manipulate layers through the layer dialogue box and have visretain set to 1 to hold our changes.
1.A I just reviewed my External Reference dialogue box, and all of the same images in the attach file are also in another drawing too. So 2 drawings have all of the images in it and are behaving the same.
2. With that said, please see the attached file. All of the unreferenced images are in my final plotting file which is basically my end product that goes out to the client. These images were never, in the survey drawing we first received that cad file. All of these images were added later in the project.
3. The other interesting thing is that I can detached the images from that drawing. But if I try to reassociate the path to the image, CAD wont let me. If I use the attach option, it wants me to bring the image into the drawing as it is not in there. Basically all that is in the survey drawing is the reference of the images.
4. So my question still remains, what is causing this to happen? Does it have to deal with how people are opening the refrence files (by double clicking it, right clicking then open, or refediting the drawings - which I am not a fan of any of them)? Or is something else going on? I dont think people are adding the images to these files other wise I would be able to reload or update the path and they would show up.
I need to address this with my CAD team but dont know how to go about it yet. Please help. Thank you.