Bangalore, India
The most difficult software bugs to fix are those that appear randomly and cannot be reproduced or predicted.
While working with BricsCAD, I have experienced my fair share of unpredictable behavior which would often be difficult even for Bricsys support to pinpoint and fix. While interacting with Bricsys Lisp guru, Torsten Moses over a long TeamViewer session today, he pointed me to a small tip which made a big difference in solving the problem at hand. He asked me to install BricsCAD not by double-clicking the executable but by right-clicking and select the "Run as Administrator" option. I did that and installed BricsCAD even though I was logged in with full administrator rights. This small change seems to have made a big difference. The persistent layout switch bug that draPRO on BricsCAD was showing got fixed in an instant. No one knows how or why but it is apparently one of the best kept Microsoft secrets of what happens when you install an application as an administrator.
I am writing this post to alert all software users, including BricsCAD, not to forget this trick when you run into unexplained problems. This could be one simple solution you failed to try.
This is what Torsten had to say "Having BricsCAD installed by "Run as Administrator" seems to have added some (COM-related?) details, which never get uninstalled, and those ensured that BricsCAD runs properly. Sounds a bit strange, but I can confirm from my own and many clients' experience, that installing "Run as Administrator" makes a delicate difference ... thanks to Microsoft :-("
While on the subject of BricsCAD, Torsten warned me that the current version V 13.1.8 of BricsCAD current on the Bricsys web-site has a Lisp engine with a faulty garbage collection. You could run into a nasty bug using Lisp on V 13.1.8. The workaround is to use BricsCAD V 13.1.7 or patch your 13.1.8 installation with this fixed version of the Lisp engine (click here to download). You must copy this LispEx.dll file to the folder where you have installed BricsCAD and make sure you find the same file already existing there which must be over-written. If you are not using V 13.1.8 of BricsCAD, do not both about these instructions.
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