Topic: Sturcture Library not found

[Ken]

We're starting to roll out LDD 2006 in our office. It's been installed on two machines and works fine. I installed on my machine and it doesn't show anything in the Structure Library. We know the library is there and okay because everything shows up on the other two machines. We've uninstalled and reinstalled a number of times, no luck. We still have 2005 on all the machines, but now on my machine it won't find the structures in 2005 either. I can create a new structure, but it won't hold that new struture after exiting LDD.

At another company, we found that these problems were usually caused by a corrupt project.dfm file. We were able to cut and paste one from another project and fix the problem. So, my guess is there's a problem with a pointer to the project.dfm file, but we don't know how to fix it.

We've tried every suggestion from AutoDesk, with no success! I'm hoping there's somebody out there that has some ideas as to why this one machine is not installing and running like the other machines. Maybe somebody has something else we can try.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Ken

[Dinosaur]

The structure definition files " blkcor.pst " & " blkdef.pst " for the structure library are by default located in <program dir>\data\pipeworks.  This default path can be changed in " user preferences " under the projects pulldown.  I have moved these files along with other label, template, etc settings that I have created to the user area where the support files are now held.  This prevents me from having to recreate all of my customizations if a reinstall is needed.

[Ken]

Dinosaur,

I definitely want to try your suggestion, but I don’t know for sure what section under “User Preferences” is related to the .pst files. I think it’s the “Symbol Manager Files”, is that correct? Also, if the project now looks in the Project File for the .pst files, how does changing this path cause it to look at this new location instead of the project file?

And our bigger question, is why LDD 2006, isn’t finding the .pst files that are currently in the project file? It seems to be pointed somewhere else. I can open the same drawing in 2005 and it finds the correct .pst files, so we know they are there. We have other systems with 2006 loaded and those installs find the .pst file for this project. We used the same install procedure with my computer and can’t figure out why my 2006 install is somehow different and how to fix it to get 2006 on my machine to find them. We have Unistalled and Installed a number of times, with no success.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion. If you can give me a little clarification on what to do, I’ll give it a try and see if that will at least get my machine working right.

Ken

[Dinosaur]

I have heard of nothing but problems for people running 2005 and 2006 products (especially LDDT and Civil 3D) on the same machine and most of them are issues just as you are describing.  2006 products are redefining default paths to data to the 2006 default locations and the 2006 files are not compatable with drawing elements created in 2005.  Curiously this seems to be specific to individual machines as you have observed and it appears to be centered in the registry values that are not removed when the program is uninstalled, hence no affect no matter how many times you reinstall.

Is 2006 finding ANY .pst file or just the wrong one?  If it is finding the wrong one, try renaming that folder to get it off of the search path.  This method is working with many of these problems.

Although the symbol manager files are stored with the project, they can be exported so they can be imported and reused with any project.  Find a good one that contains every structure you want to keep with along with your standard label settings for both storm and sanitary and overwrite the same file in your data folder in the program directory (the .pst files are found in the pipeworks subdirectory).  At this point I make a copy of this data folder which contains every default setting for a project along with any customization you have made and place it somewhere secure from an overwriting by the program.  I also make a copy in my user folder as describe previously.  Most of the changes made in the user preferences settings work, but I have found the pipeworks in particular still look in the program folder first so that file must stay current.  If you add or change things and want to preserve those changes for future projects just overwrite the old files with the new ones created in that project.

[Ken]

We found the problem!!!

We had me log off my machine as a user and had someone else log on. And after opening 2006, it found the sturctures!! It turns out to be a user problem, not a machine problem.

At some point in my installs and uninstalls, we used a different profile setup. This apparently created some additional things in the register. By deleting the problem items in the register (somebody else did that ... I know better than to mess with the register file), once I logged on again and opened 2006, it went through a short install process (I did not have to do a complete uninstall) and that fixed the problem. The correct Structure Library is now available.

What we determined is that even a complete uninstall did not remove the additional problem items that had been created in the register and therefore continued to cause problems no matter how many times I reinstalled.

Hope this will help anybody having the same kind of problem. Thanks for all the suggestions.

Ken