AutoCAD 2010/2011/2012 DWG Format

[#1]

I support a school district CAD lab that has AutoCAD 2011 educational stand alone version on 13 windows XP desktop machines. Here recently, one of the machines hit a problem where when you load AutoCAD, it'll freeze up and become unresponsive. Cursory googling was telling me that I needed to go into task manager and end the WSCommCntr2.exe process and AutoCad should load fine. However, on this particular computer, WSCommCntr is not appearing in the task manager, and when I booted the troubled computer side by side with a working one, it appears as though it's freezing up before WSCommCntr is even being loaded into memory.

I have eliminated any flaw with the computer itself (Defragged, scandisc, ran memory, HDD, CPU utilities that all came back with flying colors, antivirus and spyware scans came up negative), and it has the same hardware profile and software installed as the other 12 computers in the room that are all working fine. I've uninstalled/reinstalled AutoCAD 2011 twice in order to try to fix this problem, once to install just autoCAD minus Design review (Design review working absolutely fine on this machine the whole time), and again just to get it back to the way the other machines in the CAD lab are. A repair install similarly did not work for me.

I've now run out of ideas, can I get any suggestions of things to try?

[#2]

Could be a problem with the .net framework.

Try uninstall and reinstall Microsoft .net framework 3.5

[#3]

Reinstalled .NET 3.5 and it looks like it's now loading up fine. Thanks for that tip, I would of never thought of .Net being the issue.

[#4]

As an update to this situation: Looks like the issue isn't completely resolved. That same computer started freezing up again today on boot at the exact same spot. I went ahead and reinstalled .net 3.5 and fixed it again, but I'm not sure if it's going to screw up on me again somewhere down the line. It's going to be really annoying if I have to come back on a weekly basis to do a .net reinstall. Anything else I can look at or try?

[#5]

Turn off the automatic update from windows.

Because, if you open acad.exe.config in your computer there is a place it said:

"We always use the latest version of the framework installed on the computer."

When window updates your framework, your autocad quit working.

[#6]

Allright, that's what I needed to know then. Will disable auto updates and call it good.

Thanks again.