Autodesk Inventor Services & Support

Intermittent crashes in Inventor with the 3DConnexion space mouse

Published date: 2009-Aug-05
ID: TS13647537

Applies to:
AutoCAD® Inventor LT™ Suite 2010
AutoCAD® Inventor® Professional Suite 2010
AutoCAD® Inventor® Routed Systems Suite 2010
AutoCAD® Inventor® Simulation Suite 2010
AutoCAD® Inventor® Suite 2010
AutoCAD® Inventor® Tooling Suite 2010

Issue

Inventor may crash when you use a 3DConnexion controller in conjunction with the Ribbon User Interface.  After you’ve actively used the 3D mouse for a period of 10 to 20 minutes, moving the 2D mouse over the Ribbon can cause Inventor to terminate.
 
This issue most frequently occurs on Windows® XP (32 and 64 bit) systems with the Ribbon User Interface. Occasionally it may occur on Windows® Vista or when using the Classic UI.  It may take longer than 20 minutes to encounter this issue depending on your use of the 3D mouse.

Solution

This issue is caused by a leaked timer resource in the 3DConnexion driver. Once the timers are exhausted, the Microsoft WPF implementation will throw an exception that terminates the Inventor Application.
 
You can fix this issue by updating your version of the 3DConnexion driver from:
http://3dconnexion.com/support/downloads.php
 
3DxSoftware v. 3.7.18 contains a fix for this issue.
 
Though this issue most frequently occurs on Windows XP, it is highly recommended that you still update to version 3.7.18 if you are using Windows Vista. 
 
Similarly, you should update to version 3.7.18 if you are using earlier versions of Inventor software.

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