How many times have you been working in AutoCAD®, and then suddenly it freezes on you? Panic sets in, as you try to remember the last time you saved… You wait… and wait… and… thankfully AutoCAD® un-freezes, this time…
Check the Windows task manager to make sure no remnants of a previous sessions of AutoCAD are still active. Reset AutoCAD back to the default settings. More info from the Autodesk KB: AutoCAD appears to freeze or hang during startup Software hangs at “Checking License” or “Loading”. AutoCAD or F/X CAD Freezes on Startup When Trying to Activate (License) Issue When you attempted to license (activate) F/X CAD or AutoCAD, the activation dialog box opened briefly, the AutoCAD dialog box behind it turned white, and the program froze.
But what actually is the cause of AutoCAD® freezing? It depends – there are many potential reasons for AutoCAD® freezing, but some can be avoided completely with a little understanding of what’s actually happening.
Selections
The first and most obvious reason for AutoCAD® freezing is when we do things to a very large selection. What can sometimes be unexpected is when AutoCAD® freezes when we have merely selected the objects without doing anything to them. This can sometimes leave us gazing at an hourglass thinking “I didn’t ask you to do anything! Why are you freezing on me!?”. Odd as this may seem, there is a reason for it.
When a selection is made, any on screen information that relates to your active selection needs to be updated; otherwise you’ll be working from incorrect information. So, if for example you have the properties window on your screen anywhere, even if it is docked with the auto-hide feature enabled, all the data in the properties window needs to be updated with correct information. The time that this takes is proportional with the amount of things selected, so you can see that simply selecting objects can be the cause of AutoCAD® freezing.
There are ways of working that allow us to drastically reduce the frequency of AutoCAD® freezing when working with a large selection. Make sure you select commands before you make a selection. This sends a clearer instruction to AutoCAD®, and it is dealt with more quickly than if we make the selection first. By selecting first you’re saying to AutoCAD® “Here are some entities that I am interested in – prepare them for me to use in any way”. This is vague, so AutoCAD® has to prepare for anything. However by invoking the command first and making a selection afterwards you’re saying “I only care about performing this action – these are the entities I want to perform it on”. This instruction is much clearer and skips out a lot that we’re not interested in. An extension of this is to get out of the habit of using the Delete key for erasing entities. Yes, it works. But again, picking the erase command first and then the entities sends a clearer message with a very noticeable difference in performance when working with large selections.
Commands
There are a few commands that more commonly cause AutoCAD® to freeze than others. Hatching is one of the main ones, but again, a little know-how can avoid this. A lot of people routinely use the pick-points option for defining a hatch boundary. I personally always try to draw in a way that makes hatching easy. For example, where possible I use closed polylines instead of lines. This allows me to then hatch later by selecting a boundary, eliminating the need to pick points, potentially making AutoCAD® hang. Take a look at my post on the RECTANG command to see what I mean.
When working in 3D, you might be tempted to avoid the 3DORBIT command completely in favour of the SHIFT+MOUSEWHEEL, but there is a reason you should generally use the 3DO command instead. AutoCAD® needs to prepare for 3D orbitting, and if you’re planning on manipulating the drawing a bit, you only want to make AutoCAD® hang for this preparation once. If you use the SHIFT+MOUSEWHEEL method, you’ll make AutoCAD® prepare for 3D orbitting each time you use it, which can be very time consuming on larger drawings. So for very small drawings, its fine to use SHIFT+MOUSEWHEEL, but for everything else use 3DO.
Networked Working
Working on drawings that are saved on some external network has been known to suffer performance issues. Try where possible to work locally, but only where doing so does not undermine whatever document management system you have in place (you do have a structured and coherent document management system.. don’t you??).
Bugs
One particularly prolific bug that I’ve had problems with is the Scale List Bug. Click here to view the solution.
Tech Startups 2017
When AutoCAD® Freezes or Hangs…
Wait!!! Do not mash the keys – however tempting that may be! Doing so will only make it take longer. Try to be patient. After a minute or so, you could try a few taps on the Escape key – sometimes you can cancel the command and regain control. After a few mins longer you may want to weigh up whether or not it is worth trying to regain control at all. Is the amount of work you have done since the last save worth rescuing? That will depend on how much work you did. Often, the bulk of the work is the thought processes that went into whatever you did in AutoCAD® – this work has still been done, and you can redo the actual AutoCAD® input quite quickly. If you choose to kill AutoCAD®, you might want to know this useful keyboard shortcut – Ctrl + Shift + Escape, which brings up the task manager.
I will be updating this list in the future so you may want to revisit this post in the future. If you haven’t already, please do subscribe to howtoautocad.com. It is really simple to do – just fill out your email address below, and all you get is an email whenever I post new content. So, it can only be useful to you, and you have nothing to lose ?
Will
Issue
When you attempted to license (activate) F/X CAD or AutoCAD, the activation dialog box opened briefly, the AutoCAD dialog box behind it turned white, and the program froze.
![Autocad 2017 hangs on startup windows 10 Autocad 2017 hangs on startup windows 10](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126597983/406270519.jpg)
You may then have seen an 'Autodesk component has stopped working' message like the one pictured to the right.
Cause
Autodesk has acknowledged this issue as a known bug caused by Windows updates, which have been conflicting with AutoCAD installations.
You can find the official Autodesk solution to this issue here.
Solution
Step 1: Run the Windows updates.
Step 2: Update your video card driver.
Step 3: Try activating again. If AutoCAD or F/X CAD is still freezing and/or you're still seeing the error message, move on to Step 4.
Step 4: Remove and reinstall the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Libraries
You may need your IT administrator to help you complete this step.
1. Open your computer's Control Panel and select Programs and Features.
2. In the Programs and Features screen, uninstall each file whose name starts with Microsoft Visual C++.
To do so, select each of these files and click Uninstall.
3. Download and install all of the files linked to the right, one at a time.
Take care to download and install both the x64 and x86 versions of each of these files if you have a 64-bit operating system. The file names for both of these versions of each each file will be the same – take care not to overwrite any of these files you've already downloaded with the other version of that file.
Note that only the x86 versions of these files will work on 32-bit operating systems. Not sure whether you have a 64- or 32-bit system? Find out >
You should now be able to activate AutoCAD or F/X CAD successfully.
Still not able to activate? You may need to create a new Windows profile in order to activate successfully.