AutoCAD crashes when expanding the File menu

Issue

You selected the File menu in the menu bar and AutoCAD stopped responding and displayed the following error message:

AutoCAD Error Aborting
FATAL ERROR: Unhandled e06d7363h Exception at 7c812a5bh

You find that selecting other menu options does not trigger the crash and it seems to be limited to only the File menu.

Solution

The most common reason for this error is that an incorrect version of Microsoft DLL file, MFC80U.DLL, exists on the computer. This file is an MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class) DLL shared library that allows Windows applications (such as AutoCAD) access to common Windows functionality (such as menus).

Because this is a shared library, some Windows applications will install a copy of the DLL to ensure that it is available on the computer when needed. This is usually how a bad or incorrect version of the DLL ends up on a system—some other Windows application installs it, overwriting the proper version that was already there. As a shared library file, this can affect not only AutoCAD but many other non-Autodesk products as well.

This can usually be fixed by either installing the correct version of this DLL or by disabling the "Number of recently-used files" through the Options dialog.

Disabling the MRU files list:

When opening the File menu, AutoCAD tries to display a list of the most recently used (MRU) drawing files:

The operation of displaying this list relies on common Windows functionality available in the aforementioned DLL file. Having a bad or incorrect DLL on the system can trigger the crash.

A work-around—at least until you get the proper DLL installed—is to disable this file list so AutoCAD doesn't try and display the list of most recently used drawings.

1. Start AutoCAD.
2. Run the OPTIONS command.
3. On the "Open and Save" tab, set the value of the "Number of recently-used files" to 0.
   
   
   
   
4. Click OK to close the Options dialog.
5. Restart AutoCAD and verify that you can now select the File menu without crashing.

Note: If this does not work, you can also try using REGEDIT to delete the "Recent File List" registry key for your installation of AutoCAD. For example:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\R17.0\ACAD-5004:409\Recent File List

Replacing the incorrect version of the DLL file:

To properly correct this issue, you will need to reinstall the correct version of the MFC80U.DLL file directly from Microsoft. Visit the following links and follow the instructions to install the correct version of this package for your operating system:

Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86)
Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x64)