Inventor or AutoCAD installer starts when PDF creator is used

[harry.parfitt]

We have installed Inventor and AtuoCad Mechanical 2015 on a couple of test machines and it has been noticed that when running any other application on the workstation, selecting to Print to PDF using PDF Creator causes either an Inventor or AutoCAD installer dialogue to start. For the average user, this causes a problem, because they do not have access to the installation media nor do they have rights to carry out the install.

Our reseller has told us that the solution is to grant each user local admin rights so that they can carry out this install, however, when we roll this out to a couple of hundred workstations, this is not really feasible.

Has anyone else experienced this?

What is the interaction between Inventor and AutoCAD 2015 and PDF Creator that causes this and is there a way to stop it happening?

[TravisNave]

In my opinion, it is not feasible for your users not to have local admin rights.  Engineers should have rights to their own machines.  It does not elevate any additional rights to the domain, it just allows them to properly use their machines.  This is why all of my users have local admin rights. 

That being said, you probably need to allow full access to their own profiles as well as the All Users profile.  If the program is not allowed to create files for the user on first initialization, you will continually get this problem. 

This is a manufactured problem that is a side-effect of having too tight restrictions on a workstation.  It's an unnecessary side-effect to bad IT policy.  A simple group policy or OU change can resolve this issue quickly. 

[63t6ftn6te6g6]

Hi TravisNave I take your opinion as an opinion in its own right. But you are terribly wrong! Autodesks puts a lot of effort in its products to make them windows compliant and that includes compatibility in a secured multi user environment. If you are admin for several machines and take your job seriously, you have to secure the underlying OS from malware and misconfiguration by users. You are promoting the most careless and lazy solution for the above problem. Shame on you, because you suggest to let the mentioned design-problem go and propagate an insecure environment. In my case that brought me here, the solution was the following: 1.) run sysinternals procmon while you trigger the self-healing install 2.) look for access denied entries just when msiexec starts running the setup 3.) give access to the specific resource More detail in my case with AutoCAD LT 2015: The setup had a buggy instruction that made windowsinstaller think that EVERYONE needs write access to a subfolder in the personal userprofile of the user "install" that originally installed AutoCAD. After giving everyone write access to "C:\Users\install\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\WebServices\Dummy.txt" the problem went away. Of course I changed the Path by hacking the component path in "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\S-1-5-18\Components\0BE1E073FE407084B86554265447378B" Give all users of the machine admin-rights instead? HELL NO.

[Anonymous]

first you don't come on here and attack people you don't like what he said then go somewhere else and rant

this is a public forum where users are helping other users

who are you to say that how he does it is wrong?

[63t6ftn6te6g6]

It's not an attack. It's putting someone that calls restrictive IT 'Bad IT' into place. At worse you can see it as a counter-attack. Instead of ranting, I give an example how to solve that sort of problem without sacrificing security. I am a problem solver. Anything else?