For those of you not familiar, Autodesk has a program whereby those customers on subscription can download and install what amount to bits of future program functionality. This is all good  …….until you cancel your subscription. From there on in the Subscription Advantage becomes a disadvantage, and keeping your Inventor software running optimally will be problematic at best (see my article on who is the biggest Service Pack ass —Autodesk or Dassault ).

When the article linked above was written (May), Autodesk was storing the updates for Inventor with the Subscription Advantage Pack installed behind the subscription firewall —which meant that if your subscription lapsed, you could not apply any new service packs without abandoning the Subscription Advantage Pack.

In my case, Inventor’s Service Pack 1 came out before the economy forced me to shed my subscription, so I had that one installed —— but I could not apply the next two (as of this writing it is at SP3, and they sometimes go to SP4) without access to the special service packs behind the subscription firewall.

So, I resigned myself to the fact that I could not apply service packs beyond #1.  Installing the regular packs  would kill my iLogic installation, and that cannot happen.  Not that big of a deal, and I had long ago resigned to living with what I have……………. until last night.

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The Program Goes Down The Toilet

I generally push the program to the limits, and as such, get a fair amount of crashes……but last night was exceptional.  I had five in a row as I tried to use the “Make Components” command on a Layout part. I kept trying different things to see if I could narrow down what was causing the crash, and the program just kept on crashing. There was nothing really remarkable about the chain of events, except, that a toilet flashed onscreen just before the program disappeared each and every time.

The toilet in question is one that I modeled awhile back (a Kohler 3555), and it was  present in an assembly file located within the master assembly —-which  was open on a different tab.  But it was not opened by itself or in context of its parent assembly for at least a month. It was very strange (and pretty damn funny) that a toilet would flash onscreen just before the program went down the tubes.

This entire event took all of two minutes, and was of little importance beyond a good toilet story. It’s what happen next that that sparked my interest.

After each of the crashes, a CER (Customer Error Report) form popped up, and was dutifully sent to Autodesk to analyze. After 15 minutes or so, my inbox had five emails from Autodesk which amount to form letters telling me that there are service packs available that may or may not fix whatever problem I may or may not be having. Continue reading →