How to stop BricsCAD crashing during startup?

Symptoms

The program crashes on startup. The crashes may have started suddenly for no apparent reason, or after some system or program upgrades.

Cause

There can be many causes. The purpose of this item is to provide a quick checklist to allow you to fix the crash yourself or to enable you to report the crash so that we can follow it up.

Solution

  • The program installation is corrupted. By itself a corrupt install is very rare and blindly trying to reinstall will not work. What does happen is that a zealous antivirus (usually Norton Autoprotect) has quarantined one or more dll files that it considers suspicious, causing BricsCAD to no longer start up, or sometimes to lose functionality. The approach then is to resolve this conflict with the antivirus: Establish whether the antivirus did indeed cause a false positive and add an exception to the antivirus. Then fix the installation, e.g., by reinstalling.
  • The program configuration is bad. A program configuration undergoes a history of changes across versions and it is possible that after an upgrade a new version of BricsCAD encounters something it cannot handle.
  • It is possible that BricsCAD's COM registration is broken, this can happen for various reasons, and can result in very strange defects and behavior, up to program crashes and third-party application failures. To re-register the COM interface properly, activate the run as admin checkbox in the desktop shortcut icon - normally it is sufficient to start BricsCAD once with this option enabled. If multiple BricsCAD versions and/or x86 and x64 versions are installed on the same machine, then it is mandatory to have the run as admin option enabled, because each BricsCAD version and platform has its own COM interface.
  • Maybe the BricsCAD profile which stores settings across BricsCAD sessions (the user profile is stored in the windows registry) has ended up with values the program cannot handle. This can be verified by starting BricsCAD with a clean profile bricscad.exe /p newprofilename. This can be done on the windows Command line, by editing the BricsCAD shortcut, or by using the standalone BricsCAD ProfileManager tool (profilemanager_app.exe). This approach does not delete the original profile, so it can be recovered if needed, or attached to a support request for diagnostics even if the user managed to avoid the immediate crash. When starting with a new drawing, select a 2d drafting template to exclude the possible impact of RedSdk problems. The BIM and Mechanical templates use Redsdk.
  • Maybe one of the resource files (default.cui, lisp files, pgp file..) cannot be loaded correctly. To verify this quickly try renaming the folder:
    %APPDATA%\Bricsys\BricsCAD\V15x64\en_US\Support
    If BricsCAD starts (stunted but running) then you have narrowed down the problem to this folder and one can try renaming it back and piecemeal moving/renaming its content, starting with the cui file.
  • Maybe a third-party application causes the crash. The above approaches will already disable most third-party applications, but extra actions may be needed to fully disable them.
  • Or it is more complicated. Then please file a support request.
    Please add log files and crash reports when reporting crashes.
Note: Start BricsCAD in Safe Mode. If the problem goes away, then it can be helpful to switch back to normal mode and disable or uninstall plug-ins and customizations to narrow down the culprit.