Windows UAC - Inventor 2013 & ACAD DWG's

by Clint Brown

urn down your Windows UAC before Installing Autodesk Inventor.

I was recently onsite with a customer who had done their own CAD upgrades, and to be fair had done a really good job, but after the install, they were having peculiar behaviour on about 75% of their machines.

What had happened was that they were unable to export out an AutoCAD DWG from Inventor, on the Save dialogue box, when clicking on the “Options” button, nothing happened, and one some machines, Inventor would crash.

We checked service packs, hotfixes and graphics, all of which were spot on. The users all had local Admin rights and the install all appeared to go on correctly.

After some brief investigation, I realised that the machines with the problem, all had the Windows UAC turned up to about half way.

I turned this right down, tried a repair install, then a re-install (these were unsuccessful) and finally had to uninstall then re-install Inventor to fix the problem.

Moral of the story… Turn down your UAC (you can always turn it back up after the install) Disable any live scans on your anti-virus during the install, and ensure that you have local Admin rights on the PC.

For help on turning down the UAC, see http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/turn-user-account-control-on-or-off