Import custom settings from 2017 into 2018 breaks Vault tab, causes crashes

[tcmtconneen]

Before our rollout of Inventor 2018 this weekend, one of our users took the time to export his custom settings from 2017 from the Tools->Customize dialog.  He had a number of custom key bindings he wanted to preserve.  On Monday he imported the settings into his freshly installed copy of Inventor 2018 (w/ 2018.0.1 update).  AFAIK importing these settings from a previous version is meant to be supported.

Well, this had terrible consequences.  For one thing, the Vault tab became badly broken.  Both the Log In and Log Out buttons were grey at the same time; only the Open button was not greyed out.  Clicking Open presented the Log In to Vault dialog; but as soon as the login was completed, Inventor crashed w/ the error report dialog, every time.

Furthermore, clicking Finish Sketch on the simplest possible sketch (on a standard plane in an empty part) immediately crashed Inventor every time.  There may have been other problems, but we moved him to a spare workstation for the rest of the day.

Investigating the broken Vault tab led me to find that the important EDM add-in was unable to load.  Looking into that detail led to a Vault forum topic "Vault buttons are greyed out" where user chrisjuk12 pointed out that user profile corruption can lead to EDM not loading.  We backed up and deleted Inventor and Vault related folders in the user's AppData\Roaming folder and users's HKCU\Software\Autodesk\Inventor key in accordance with chrisjuk12's suggestions, and the problem was solved.

Since the only thing this user had done differently from our 12 other users was import his customization settings, I took the XML file he'd exported from 2017 and imported it on a spare workstation running Inventor 2018.  The impact was exactly the same: same symptoms on the Vault tab, same crashes after finishing sketches.

Thought I would post our experience here in case other users are having this problem.  I would attach the XML settings file, but that doesn't seem like a good idea as it's pretty much toxic to Inventor 2018.  The file itself does not seem to be corrupted in any way -- it's a complete XML file down to the closing tag.  I have forwarded it to the Inventor CER Report address in a reply to the automated CER email generated by one of his crashes.

[Mark.Lancaster · Accepted solution]

@tcmtconneen

If you get another machine to crash with the crash report..  Private message me and I will inform you of your next steps.

I know it seems like this should be possible but I have seen cases where the application options/custom ribbon settings have caused Inventor to crash.

For example if you use the Inventor Reset Utility..  You back up application options/menu stuff.   After the reset, importing these backed up XML files causes crashes or the original problem comes back.

For me I find its much easier to have a screen shot of your settings and then duplicating them in the next version.  In addition the application options for 2018 has been changed and that may be causing some issues too.

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! The behavior does not sound right to me. Could you send me an email (johnson.shiue@autodesk.com) with the email address you submitted the crash report? I would like to locate the reports and understand the issue better.

Many thanks!

[tcmtconneen]

Johnson and I have exchanged a couple emails about this, and he indicates that it has been possible to reproduce this crash.

He asked me to try Run As Administrator, but that didn't make a difference; the crash did still occur in this case.

He also suggested using the Inventor Reset Utility to fix it, which did work.  I could have just run the utility instead of manually deleting folders/keys.  Of course, the user still had to manually configure his hotkeys afterward.

None of our other users tried importing 2017 hotkeys into 2018.  But one of our users did copy hotkeys from another user after they were manually configured.  That was 2018 to 2018, and it worked fine.  So it seems importing from a prior version was the problem.

I have set Mark Lancaster's reply as the accepted solution since he recommends not importing these settings from a prior version.