Other than that "AutoCAD 2010" bit in the title of this thread, you can do a search on the Autodesk Knowledge Base for this error and it will pull up an article from AutoCAD 2002. However, we're using AutoCAD 2010 and I'm unable to find a solution to this problem. I figured I would describe it here and see if anyone else has encountered this, and if anyone has any suggestions for a fix, outside of the plethora of things that I've already tried.
Our current project has a number of Xref's (Mechanical, Plumbing, Structural, Architectural, etc) and we're doing all of our work in Model space on top of the xref's. When a command is active, and the pointer is positioned over an xref, the pointer jumps from place to place, as if it is trying to catch up with the movement of the mouse. This makes it extremely difficult to select an individual line, for example, when trying to fillet. It's at the point where it's nearly intolerable.
The first response that usually comes out of people (in my experience so far) is "sounds like a video problem". The second response is usually "running object snaps".
So let me tell you the things that we have tried, before I go any further, and then I'll tell you our results.
We've tried 4 different video cards (ATI as well as nVidia, one of them costing ~$1,000.00) and 3 different operating systems (XP Pro, Windows 7 32 bit, Windows 7 64bit). We've tried it on 2 different types of machines (Quad core with 4GB of RAM, and a Quad-Dual core with 8GB). We've tried changing every setting that Autodesk (and the autocad community) suggested. We've taken our Xref's, wblocked them out to re-write the drawing database from scratch, exploded everything in the xref's and taken them down to simple lines and arcs, and still the problem (sorta) persists.
Now I say "sorta" persists because here's the really odd bit. We have several identical machines in the office and the problem exists on some of the computers and not the others. For example; I don't have the problem myself, but the guy who sits next to me (with an identical setup and machine) has these problems on a massive scale. I've setup a profile from my machine and loaded it on his, with no change in the way that AutoCAD is behaving. I've mimicked all of my system variables on his machine with no change in performance.
And as to how AutoCAD is behaving let me go a little further into detail;
If a user is in paper space, with the border xref'd in, the pointer lags terribly over the drawing when a command is active (any command). In paper space there is a viewport with a view of the group of xref's that are in model space. If the user unloads the border, the lag of the pointer goes away in paper space completely, even over the viewport. And then the user switches to model space...
When a command is active, and the pointer is hovering above the xrefs, the pointer skitters and jumps, is ridiculously slow, and is painful to work with. Move the pointer off of the xref and it works as you might expect it to, fast and smooth.
So let me tell you what it isn't, first of all, and I'd be happy to hear any suggestions for what it actually is.
It isn't LAYOUTREGENCTL, it isn't Hyperlinks or the Shortcut menu, it isn't the lack of the latest service pack, it isn't object snaps or tracking, it isn't "selection preview", it isn't the plethora of other system variables and disabling of tools that others have suggested. It isn't hardware acceleration, it isn't adaptive degredation...
No matter what we've tried, the people who are having this problem continue to have this problem. In fact, we tried it out on some older dual core machines with 2GB of ram and on-board intel video cards... and neither of those machines exhibited the symptoms that I described above. Other than being as slow as one might expect AutoCAD to be on such a machine (especially with only 32MB of video ram) the computers functioned perfectly.
So I'm at a loss. If you have any ideas, I'd be interested in hearing them. :ugly:
