I can agree with you Chuck - kind of - for the most part - it is a gamble on your part that all can and will be solved with the start over from scratch and the odds ARE pretty fair that the problem will be solved at least with "vanilla" AutoCAD. Should the unthinkable happen though, and the problem persists or reoccurs even after you have nuked your hard drive, you are back where you started with a net loss of all that time restoring your installation. Even worse, you know absolutely nothing yet about what is going on except there is a darned good chance it will keep happening until you find the answer.
The "vertical applications" such as LDD, C3D, and ADT are becoming dependent on other programs such as MS Office to do all of its functions. Unfortunately, not all versions of The AutoCAD apps play nicely with the various versions of the supporting software. You can not even depend on the newest MS Office to be completely compatible with any version of LDD and what LDD really wants is to have Access '97 available for all of its database functions. 2004 through 2006 will tolerate Office XP when it is using it, but woe be unto the poor tech who opens up an mdb file to take a peek and alters something or saves it using anything other than Access '97.
We are also finding more complex search paths with each release and increasingly, paths to certain data is being hard coded. If a location is changed the program can be instantly be rendered inoperable.
Even with a complete un-install, there are remnants left in various folders and in the registry that can be hiding the cause of any given problem. There are explicit instructions for removing all of these, but there is a chance some could be missed, especially in the registry where the even few who dare attempt an edit want to get out as quickly as possible. It is a mass of cryptic file and folder names for most that all seem to look much too similar to be confidently deleting things without taking an uncomfortably long time double checking every move.
In short there are a lot of ways things can go wrong with an installation that are easy to correct but quite difficult to find. If some time is taken - even if it must be all on your own nickle - to check out everything you can before answering "yes" to the "are your sure" prompt, there is a fair chance you will at least discover the remedy to some future problem if not the current one and you have started building you own knowledge base of troubleshooting your program.
The decision to start from scratch is nothing more than unconditional surrender that destroys any additional chance to discover a real solution. Sometimes this is a necessary decision, but not one to be taken lightly or in haste. In my particular shop, surrender is always the preferred solution. If a problem is reported, one had best have everything saved in a secure location as your station might be in mid format by the time you return to your seat. Hence, I am doing most of my own troubleshooting these days and avoiding reporting problems whenever possible.
