We upgraded AutoCAD LT 2015 to AutoCAD 2017 in the office by installing 2017, then carrying across settings and uninstalling the old one. On the first few PCs this worked OK but then it broke the Explorer file assciations horribly.
It produced an error along the lines of Cannot find AutoCAD LT 2015. Which was of course obvious because it was no longer on the machine.
After searching for the answer, this thread suggested wiping the machines, which currently was not an option.
The next option was to re-associate the files with AutoCAD rather than DWG launcher. This is really annoying solution as everytime you double click in explorer it launches a completely new process of AutoCAD which is very resource heavy when launched lots of times. This however was our temporary fix.
After some research, here is the solution if file associations in Explorer for AutoCAD are broken. This a tweaked version of what is shown on this page.
Fire up regedit (note you can break things with regedit, you have been warned!)
- Press WINDOWS-R on the keyboard to bring up the Run window, enter REGEDIT and click OK.
- Navigate to the following folder:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\DwgCommon\shellex\apps - Select the sub-key folder under “apps,” including the long string of numbers and letters that identify your version of AutoCAD.
- On the right pane, verify that the “OpenLaunch” key contains the path to the correct acad.exe file. Double-click and edit if necessary – this bit you need to change 2015 to 2017.
- On the left pane, right-click the folder with the long string of numbers and choose “Copy Key Name.”
- Select the “apps” folder, and in the right pane, double-click (Default).
- Delete the current data value and paste the key name that you copied. Be sure to remove the folder path that precedes the key name.
- Click OK and close the Registry Editor window.
I found at this stage nothing seemed to have changed. So ensure that you right click and go to choose another app.
Once on the choose another app bit click on AutoCAD DWG Launcher and click Always use the app.
This should mean that now when you double click DWG files AutoCAD LT 2017 will launch and all will work properly. You might find as we did that AutoCAD LT 2017 went through the initial start-up and migration settings again. Click always associate DWG files with AutoCAD LT if this box comes up.
You might find at this stage that your icons are still blank. No worries. Reboot.
Once rebooted we found when we double clicked that the “How do you want to open this file” box came up again. We clicked AutoCAD DWG Launcher and all the icons suddenly appeared.
Hope this fix works for you!