Classic Shell: Forum

I'm sorry that my first post to this forum was made under such unfortunate circumstances, but I felt it was necessary to bring this to people's attention.

I am running a Win 7 installation on this PC (Service Pack 1). Yesterday I upgraded to CS version 4.0.2. After restarting the computer, I found that attempting to use the Open and Save commands within AutoCAD LT 2006 caused the program to lock up, with the only way to close the program being a force-quit from Task Manager. The problem persisted even after I did a reinstall of AutoCAD, leading me to believe that the problem wasn't with AutoCAD. And it was only when the Open and Save dialog boxes would appear that the program locked up -- if kept in console only, it had no problems.

I'm fairly certain that Classic Shell is the cause of the problem, because upon uninstalling CS, the problem went away. I'll have to roll back to my previous installation of CS until this bug is addressed and fixed in a future version. I have had no conflicts with previous versions of CS, and I'd like to say that up until this point I've been a very satisfied user of CS. Keep up the good work.

If you are willing to troubleshoot and install Classic Shell to test it, install it please, start Classic Explorer and check the following 2 settings:
- On the File Pane tab, check if "Show overlay only in Explorer" is unchecked. If not, uncheck it.
- On the File Operation tab, uncheck "Enable only in Explorer".

Then see if AutoCAD crashes. If it does, then you can also check if uninstalling just the Explorer component fixes it too.

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I am a Windows enthusiast and helped a little with Classic Shell's testing and usability/UX feedback.

It would be helpful to capture a crash dump from autocad. Follow the instructions at the top about crashdumps but instead of "procdump -e explorer.exe" use "procdump -e autocad.exe" (or whatever the exe name is).

So far, I've rolled back to CS version 3.9.5 (I can't remember which version I had before the last update) and the problem is not resolved. I modified the two "show only in Explorer" options mentioned by GauravK and that didn't change anything.

I've attached two dump files from AutoCAD, one from saving, one from opening. (The problem is a hung window, not an actual crash, so I had to trigger the "-h" flag in the dump program instead.) I hope this is helpful in some way.

EDIT - I've rolled all the way back to the 3.6.8 general release (I didn't want to risk trying any of the beta versions in between), and AutoCAD no longer hangs when opening/saving a file.

There seems to be a bug in AdFTP.dll, which is part of AutoCAD. In its DllMain routine it is calling some shell functions. That's not allowed as it can lead to the so-called "loader lock". In this case it is hanging on the initialization of the Classic Explorer plugin that shows the "shared" overlay icon.

You have 3 options:
1) Stick with an older version like 3.6.8. It does less stuff when it is initialized
2) Check the setting "Show overlay only in Explorer", which should remove the plugin from all other processes
3) For a more targeted approach, you can try adding aclt.exe to the Classic Explorer's blacklist. See the Administrative Settings section in the help

I tried installing CS 4.0.2 again with both of the "Show overlay only in Explorer" options checked. (I also added "aclt.exe" to the Classic Explorer blacklist, which was strange since the "ClassicExplorer" sub-key didn't appear in the registry at all.) The problem seems to have resolved itself. Thank you for the help.