Civil 3D 2011 freezes randomly

[tremolite]

Every couple of weeks at random, my AutoCAD just freezes up and gives me the spinny wheel like it is thinking.  No other programs on my computer are affected at all by this.  Will happen every couple of minutes for a couple minutes.  It will happen why I'm not even trying to run any commands, it just freeze. 

The only temp fix I can find is that if I unplug my network cable, it will stop.  Is there some auto-update it's trying to do behind the scenes and not getting through my companys firewall?

Any help or ideas would be great.

Thanks!

Nick

[AlmasSuljevic]

It seems that there may be some service set up to run in the background. See if it happens regulary, it may be scheduled. Use Task Manager and see if you can identify which service is running. Virus scanner is the first thing that comes to mind.

[tremolite]

It is pretty random, hasn't happened to me in almost a month and it only affects AutoCAD. 

[blt]

We have this happen at least once a day on every machine we have C3D 2011 on.  If you wait it will eventually unfreeze.  Sometimes it take up to 5 minutes to unfreeze.  We have tried to determine what we were doing at the time it freezes but it not the same every time.

[Sinc]

Maybe try playing with the InfoCenter Settings...?

In the upper-right, click on the downward-pointing black triangle just to the right of the search text box, then select "Search Settings".  This will call up the InfoCenter Settings panel, where you can disable some of the online stuff.  For example, you can set General -> Check for new online content to "Never", turn off RSS feeds, etc.  If your problem is being caused when C3D is trying to look online for something, then hopefully one of these settings can stop it.

[tremolite]

I'll give that a shot.

Thanks!

Nick

[tremolite]

Didn't help, still doing is this morning. 

I'm running twin NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 cards and got an error this morning "The NVIDIA OpenGL driver lost connection with the display driver and is unable to continue" when doing some windows updates. Anyone have problems with these?

My computer:

HP Z600

Xeon X5650 @2.67 GHz (2)

12 bg ram

Win 7 Pro 64bit

[neilyj666]

Yes it's pretty poor behaviour from C3D - I have found hitting CTRL sometimes brings it back to life at once

[blt]

What's your version number on your video driver?  I see that we are using the same video card.

[tremolite]

8.17.12.6779

I just installed the AutoCAD driver off of NVIDIA's website this morning and it seems to have taken care of the problem.  I hope that is it as I have one other system in the office with the same card/issues, and another 3 systems coming for the rest of my team.

[blt]

Is this the new driver or the old one?

[josephbouza5497]

I'm willing to bet you have SSM open, yes?

[tremolite]

I'm assuming the new driver.  Was the latest on NVIDIA's site.

SSM?

[neilyj666]

SSM = Sheet Set Manager

[tremolite]

Ah, yes.  SSM was open. 

[josephbouza5497]

And if you close the Sheet Set database (right click close sheet set) and x out the pallet does you performance improve?

[blt]

On my machine when  this happened I could unfreeze it by clicking on the second monitor or by hitting the ctrl key as suggested above but I did not have ssm open.  On the machine where we had to wait 5 minutes for it to unfreeze,  ssm was open.  We will close ssm and see if that helps.  Thank for the tip.

[josephbouza5497]

12 Gig of RAM!

You lucky dog

[touzel2]

Where exactly do I go to close the sheet set manager?

[Joe-Bouza]

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@touzel2 wrote:

Where exactly do I go to close the sheet set manager?

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At the top of the sheet list; right click>> close Sheet Set. then close the palette. It is not  bad Idead to keep paletes to a minimum so you may want to close em all, and open until performance dgrades. SSM is definately a culprit