Expert: Bill DeShawn - 5/12/2008

Question
I am a designer for a Civil firm in Atlanta. We updated our AutoCAD from 2004 to 2007. However since we older drawings that are still in 2004 format along with Many projects from Land desktop 2004, we have kept the 2004 version installed on several computers. Those computers have been experiencing random fatal errors 1 to 2 times a day since we installed 2007. The parameters of each of these computers matches the computers where we only have 2007 or Civil 3D 07 installed, but those computers do not crash. Do you think there is any connection to having both versions installed and if so is there a way besides uninstalling the older version to fix it? Thank you for your time.

Answer
There is no knowledge base articles on 2007 Civil and 2004 Civil or AutoCAD crashing because people in the office are using the two different versions.  What you're not saying, but what I suspect your office is doing is saving down to 2004 from 2007.  Problems are knows to happen doing this, but there is a hotfix for the ARX error messages that you can get and Duplicate Key error messages as well.  Sometimes you have to hold the ENTER key down for a hundred or so error messages to go through when you run a command.  It's very annoying, but it doesn't crash.  Make sure you have the latest service packs for both versions, and this hotfix:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=7047389&linkID=...
was quite useful for us to rid ourselves of those errors.  

But the random fatal errors are not something we have been experiencing.

If you find that uninstalling is what you need to do, use this URL to download instructions on fully uninstalling AutoCAD.
http://discussion.autodesk.com/adskcsp/servlet/JiveServlet/download/186-662427-5...

I have also read that there is a .NET incompatibility issue.  
It was said that you may need to uninstall AutoCAD as directed in the downloadable document, then uninstall all versions of
.NET installed in Windows, restart your PC, reinstall AutoCAD.
If the two versions AutoCAD require two different versions of .NET, that could be an issue.

Before doing anything drastic like uninstalling and reinstalling, audit your drawings, automatically fixing errors within.  One thing I may suggest:  Put the following code in ACAD2007DOC.LSP:
(command "_.audit" "y") to automatically audit your drawings every time you open them.  Audit about once an hour, especially if the drawing was opened in 2007 and saved down.  It sounds ridiculous, but this practice has helped us tremendously as some of us are running ADT 2006 and other are running ADT 2004.  We crash much less often than we used to.

Another way to convert drawings is with DWG TRUEVIEW.  The 2008 and 2009 versions will both get rid of a lot of errors common to saving down to 2004.

I'm sure I haven't "hit the nail on the head", but I think I've given you a lot of options to explore.  Auditing is the one I think I would do first.

Keep in touch
Bill DeShawn
http://my.sterling.net/~bdeshawn