AutoCAD LT 2015 Start Menu shortcut broken

Having now noticed that the shortcut entry in the start menu for AutoCAD LT 2015 is broken on several machines I have used, I would go as far as saying this is probably a common issue, however I cannot seem to find much on the internet about it.

startmenuallprograms

The issue is when you click on “AutoCAD LT 2015 – English” under the AutoDesk – AutoCAD LT 2015 – English folder, AutoCAD attempts to configure itself again, even though it is installed and configured. After a short space of time the configuration will fail resulting in a pop-up stating

“Run setup.exe to install AutoCAD LT 2015 – English”

Clicking on the OK button results in another pop-up stating

“Fatal error during installation.”

LTfail01

Not particularly helpful AutoDesk, did you actually test this software? Useless software support as usual. Anyway, as  the desktop shortcut works fine (I hope you didn’t delete it), all you need to do is delete the broken shortcut in the start menu and copy the desktop shortcut into the folder.

To do this, left click on the Windows Blob and then right click on “All Programs” and go to “Open All Users” (under a locked down environment this will need Administrator rights to edit).

Openallprograms

Double click on Programs and again on Autodesk and then once more on AutoCAD LT 2015 – English, now you will see a Migrate Custom Settings Folder, Attach Digital Signatures link and the AutoCAD LT 2015 – English link. Delete this link and copy the one from the desktop to this folder. Close window and the Start menu will now have a working link.

Flickering Update Again

Further to my previous post regarding renaming AecCore.crx, it has been suggested that this could break other things. A slightly “better” patch would be to copy the AecCore.crx from the 2013 install and place it into the 2014 folder. This does work and no visible breakage yet!

Our CAD support people have suggested that this patch is a reasonable temporary solution though they say if an update from AutoDesk arrives then you will need to revert back to the 2014 version of the AecCore.crx file before installing the update.

Also the CAD support people looking at this flickering issue with AutoDesk at the moment and I will let you know the outcome of that.

Phantom Drive in the Cloud

A slight tangent on my usual posts, but today I noticed that I had a 2nd hard drive in my Windows Explorer that I knew did not exist. This phantom drive turns out to be a mapped drive for AutoDesk Cloud Sync (360)! I think this came from a Beta version of AutoCAD that I have now uninstalled but my AutoCAD 2013 is still using Cloud Sync! I had no idea this was even running. Very annoying. Its been syncing data that I didn’t even want to be copied to the cloud.

This article showed me that I could find out what the Phantom drive was by running “SUBST” from the command line (CMD.EXE) in Windows 7. The results of this were as follows: (xxxx indicates personal info removed)
C:Usersxxxx>subst
Z:: => C:UsersxxxxAppDataLocalAutodeskAutodesk SyncCloudxxxx@xxx.com

That means, Z drive is actually a folder which is my AutoDesk sync folder. Hence the hard drives were identical in properties. Confusing.

Solution: Sign out of Autodesk 360. Drive and syncing stop. Awesome!