topic Re: Duplicate instances of tool palettes in Visual LISP, AutoLISP and General Customization Forum

Duplicate instances of tool palettes

JBerns — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:20:16 GMT

Community,

After updating from AutoCAD 2022 to 2025 (March of this year), all tool palettes appeared normal in the Customize dialog.

Last month (Nov), one palette was renamed and two new palettes were added. Many users are now seeing double or triple instances of the custom palettes in the Customize dialog. Some are still seeing the palette that was supposedly renamed.

I have tried deleting the duplicates as well as all occurrences, but they just return the next time AutoCAD is started.

All users have a Tool Palette path to a shared network folder. The shared folder and its contents are read-only.

Does anyone know how to prevent these duplicates from occurring? Yes, we are using Palette Groups, but we were using groups successfully before the upgrade.

Thank you for your time and attention. I look forward to your replies.

Regards,
Jerry

Re: Duplicate instances of tool palettes

scot-65 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:34:55 GMT

There can be 2 items at issue here.

1. AcTpCatalog.atc could have multiple instances inside. Use an XML editor to check. Each line item has a unique identifier that keeps tract even though multiple lines (/"palettes") with the same name is possible.

2. Your SFSP "Tool Palette File Locations" might have more than the number of desired instances declared (one local, one on the server, etc.). If so, you will need to investigate if each AcTpCatalog.atc file does not have repeating/overlapping items.

We use 13 AcTpCatalog.atc "containers" locally for our tool palette where there are a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 14 "palettes" per container. We switch out the support path as needed.

Note that tool palettes are not backward compatible (at least I could not discover how to do this).

Also, the tool palette chatter is nowhere to be found inside a CUIX file (except perhaps if the palette is on/off in the UI).

Re: Duplicate instances of tool palettes

JBerns — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:58:31 GMT

@scot-65,

Thanks for the quick reply and information.

Which ATC catalog should I investigate? AutoCAD seems to have created several on my computer. Only two have yesterday's date.

Note that all users are configured to use the shared, network folder.

Should I just delete all local ATC files and then start AutoCAD? What are the consequences?

Regards,

Jerry