Inventor 2015 - Locks Up After Starting

by David Gate

One of our customers recently had an issue with Inventor 2015, I thought I would share the solution incase anyone else comes across the same problem.

After installing Inventor 2015 it would run up the at the first attempt but them fail to run after that. All of the good install practices were followed, AV was off, UAC was off, administrator rights were applied. Even a reinstall didn’t help. Oddly logging on as a new user Inventor would start, but only at the first attempt. The handy Inventor reset tool and a whole new profile only allowed Inventor to run the once. 

Inventor would start, the splash screen would show and then disappear and the main Inventor software would start up and be displayed. At this point it would lock up, hang and not allow you to do anything. You can see all the ribbons but nothing responds to your mouse and the mouse has a little loading wheel next to it.

The only way to get it to close would be to kill it using the task manager.

In the task manager it would say everything looked fine.

Now this obviously wasn’t true, but it did help point us in the correct direction. Notice how it mentions the new [Home] screen as part of its application name. Well this was part of the cause.

Taking a look at the running processes in the background you should see

If you end these 2 processes Inventor throws up a warning to say.

Cancel this warning and then Inventor should be perfectly usable (until you restart).

To prevent the home screen from locking up your Inventor disable it from displaying on start up in the application options.

You can also do a regedit to prevent this from starting but this is for the knowledgeable and cautious amongst us.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\Inventor\RegistryVersion19.0\System\Preferences\File] 

ShowHomeBaseOnStartup to 0 

Now you will now miss the new Home Screen,but Autodesk are aware of the issue so a fix is likely to surface soon. Some other users have reported that so HP installed software on their laptop has been the cause, others it was antivirus. More discussions can be found below.

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Inventor-General-Discussion/Can-t-use-inventor-2015/td-p/4953346

DISCLAIMER

This article contains information about editing the registry. Before you edit the registry, make sure you understand how to create a backup and restore it if a problem occurs (Microsoft Link), as this can render your system inoperable. You edit the registry at your own risk.