imageI have been trying to evaluate more of the Autodesk Inventor Fusion Technology Preview 4 functionality, and ran into a problem. I cannot run it at the home office. The fact that it’s on a mobile workstation and runs fine in one geographic location, but not another is quite strange.  After some time, and a reinstall, I had almost given up.

The application would start the crash error report after the splash screen appeared each time. I got angry and started letting them ALL send. Before too long, Autodesk, seeing the large volume of reports, and a few  frustrated messages, decided to email me, and offer a temporary workaround. Their suggestion was to kill Vault in Fusion. “Vault?” I thought.”Is that the problem?” They didn’t come out and say that, but they did specifically list it as a workaround as though they knew where the conflict was.

I started thinking about Vault, and remembered an odd path that had shown up while working in Fusion one day, causing Fusion to falter until I went into Vault and fixed it. After that there was no more problem…at the office.

The Problem – Unresolved Vault Working Folder Path

imageAfter reading the email, I went back into Vault, and sure enough one of the project working folders was still set to a path that could not be resolved at the home office location. While other applications have no problems starting with this Vault issue, Fusion TP4 can’t handle it.

The Solution – Establish a Local Working Folder Path in Vault

Go through all the working paths in the Vault, especially the ones that Fusion last logged into, and set them to a local path. Check you default working folder path as well. Once the local paths were established, Fusion came back online.

The Workaround – Disconnect Vault from Fusion

In the event that you have Autodesk Vault installed, and you’d like to continue in Fusion without Vault capabilities, follow this procedure:

Delete (or rename) a dll called Autodesk.Catalyst.Freeway.UI.VaultCommands.dll in your Fusion install location (possibly “C:\ Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor Fusion Technical Preview 4”). Deleting this dll will not impact Fusion functionality other than removing the the “Vault” menu item.