Modified the Appearances Library, now Inventor crashes on .STEP file opening

[michaelmcgovern]

We recently purged our part templates of unused materials and appearances because there were duplicates after our merge between our original 2012 library and 2013 library.  We deleted these duplicates but retained all materials that inventor uses by default, such as the "default" material.

Creating new files causes no problems, however when opening a .STEP file Inventor immedietly crashes and exits to the desktop.  We tried re-assigning the default templates that came with our install of 2013 and we can open STEP files just fine.

We tried uninstalling the latest update (Update 2 for SP1.1) but that did not change the problem.

We are using confirmed STEP files that have opened fine in the past and new STEP files that are freshly downloaded.  NOTE: the same crash occurs with .SAT and .IGES files as well, however we primarliy use STEP files.

This is occuring on two seperate machines, both running Windows 7 64-Bit with i7 processors and 16 Gigabites of RAM.

What has gone wrong?

[michaelmcgovern]

Well, we reverted back to our old templates (and all the apperiances that came with it) and still cannot import step files.  This is becoming a very serious issue...

[4donwan4]

I realize this might not help but did you try lowering the hardware tab settings in the application options? Also verify the video card driver is the one recommended. Verify Hardware certification
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?id=18844534&siteID=123112

Don

[michaelmcgovern · Accepted solution]

Figured it out... Turns out you need a "Standard.ipt" file in your template folder or Inventor will freak out.  It uses this template (as we knew it did).  We have always had two part templates, one named "Standard.ipt" that we thought we never used and one named "Standard Part.ipt" that we always used when making a new part.  When we didn't update "Standard.ipt" and didn't keep it in our templates folder we caused the error.

[JDMather]

In any case this shouldn't cause a crash.
Did you report the crash?

[swhite]

Just take your default template you like and save a copy as standard.ipt. I believe you can also change it so it uses that file when opening other tpes. In the import dialog there is an option to change to whatever template you want, and this can be saved as an import option.

[michaelmcgovern]

I submitted about 20 crash reports.  This did not used to cause crashes, but it definitely does now.  I tried renaming the Standard.ipt file to anything different and it caused a crash upon STEP file translation.