Creating Blocks

[Anonymous]

I had AutoCad 2012 installed on my PC and was running fine until Yesterday that I can not create a block anymore. When I invoked "block" command, not thing would happen but the autocad program seems to locked up. Anywhere I click in the Autocad screen, I got a bell tone as if the Edit Block dialog box went off screen somewhere. The Block function was fine before Yesterday. Another function behaved the same as the Block command was the insert command. When I type in Insert, an Insert screen showed up, I picked to "insert a block" and choose to insert a block from external place by click "Browse" button within the Insert Dialog box. No thing will happen again which was not like that before (before it would show the folder which contains my other .dwg files). And if I click anywhere I will get a bell tone.

I can hit "esc" to cancel the command and the autocad would behave normally for other commands. I tried a kind of things to see if the diagram box was hidden or some key I hit to cause this problem, but none resolve this. For block, I checked the "BLOCKEDITLOCK' setting in my autocad, it was set to 0 all the time.

Out of frustration, I installed autocad 2014 this morning. And to my surprise, the autocad 2014 does the same thing.

Anything I can do to correct this?

Would it be something in my AppData folders?

[Patchy]

Windows Restore to earlier date, that's what I would do 1st.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Patchy, that is not an option.  This is one machine at a big company...we do not have the option to rollback Windows updates.

[Patchy]

No other choices but to ask IT person to do it ?

I was thinking if you can install 2014 on your PC you can roll back the date

[Anonymous]

we are not allowed to have different versions of windows...besides, other Autocad users at the same version and same Windows update are not having this problem...has to be related to the particular machine or user profile

[Patchy]

There is an option for reset to default under Windows start button, and navigate to autocad, maybe it will do.

[nrz13 · Accepted solution]

Your dialog boxes probably are going off screen.  That kind of behavior typically happens when going from two monitors to one, or smaller monitors, changing resolution, etc.  AutoCAD is still loading the dialogs in their former positions, even though the new screen size is smaller than before.

After you open a dialog, try hitting Alt+Spacebar, then M (these are Windows shortcuts for moving windows on the screen).  Then you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to try to move them back onto the screen.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Nrz.  You were definitely on the right track. 

What happened was that my office was just relocated and I had to position my second monitor on the different side of the laptop in my new office. Apparently, AutoCad (or Windows) remembers that I have the "Create Block" dialog window opened on the secondary display to the right of the primary display (the laptop). Now that I have the secondary display on the left of the laptop and when I called for "block" function, the "create block" dialog window would still show on the non-existing display and not show on neither the primary nor the "new" secondary displays. Since the "create block" dialog window is a pop up of AutoCad, it would not show up as a window you can pick when I held down the "ALT+TAB", and I could not use the "move application window back in to view" trick.

What confused me was that for other programs, when the app. windows disappeared due to secondary display not available, I usually get the windows back onto the laptop display when I configured the laptop to have only one display. It did not work that way for AutoCad... What I did was to configure my secondary display to the right of the Laptop (primary display) again. Thus I could see and drag the "create block" back to primary display and then reconfigure the displays to the new office setting.