Inventor: The "how to draw an arc" video preview never closes

[jwatte]

For several versions now (at least from 2012 onwards,) Inventor has had the annoying habit of leaving topmost windows that don't go away on my screen. The only way to close these windows is to close the application and start it again.

This happens both when using Intel HD graphics cards, and AMD FireGL graphics cards -- I think it's a Windows window issue, not a graphics driver issue. Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8, and Windows 8 SP1 (64-bit versions.)

To reproduce this is pretty simple; start drawing a sketch, and at some point, accidentally leave the mouse over the "arc" button. Once the arc drawing tutorial starts rendering, that window won't go away. (at least not if the mouse leaves the area covered by that window at any time before it's done rendering -- haven't tried actually keeping the mouse in there, because I don't really need help on how to draw an arc.)

You can even create more than one of these windows!

It would be great if this could actually get fixed at some point.

Barring that, maybe there's some setting somewhere to turn off video previews for tools in the toolbar? Simple text pop-ups are just fine.

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi jwatte,

It sounds like maybe it's an issue that is specific to your graphics setup(s). If you close all Inventor files and then go to the Tools tab > Application Options button > Hardware tab, and set the option to Software Graphics, and then try to reproduce the issue, do you still see it? If not this indicates it is your graphics hardware.

You do not want to run Inventor using the Software Graphics setting all the time, it is only to be used as a test. But you might test the Compatibility setting to see if it eliminates the issue for you:

http://help.autodesk.com/view/INVNTOR/2014/ENU/?guid=GUID-F39A7D5F-86E5-4F48-9313-8303E9A799BA

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[jwatte]

No, that does not help. I closed the application, started it, configured software rendering, closed the application again, re-started it, opened a sketch, and hovered over the "Arc" button until the video starts playing. Once it starts playing, the pop-up window is stuck and will not go away. Given that this is a WS_TOPMOST window (ahead of all other windows) this has nothing to do with GL/D3D/graphics acceleration.

[JDMather]

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@jwatte wrote:

.. 

To reproduce this is pretty simple; start drawing a sketch, and at some point, accidentally leave the mouse over the "arc" button. .. 

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I could not reproduce this problem on my machine.

The interesting thing to me - all this time and I didn't even realize these animations were there.

[blair]

I thought I saw a post a bit ago and it had to do with Pop-Up Help Tool-Tips option.