Allplan FT New User's Survival Guide [revised 29.08.05]
very unusual in Allplan 2005 to have stability problems - much of the text below is still relevant to Windows XP installations but bear in mind that it was written several years ago ;-)

• My PC has crashed! - Very unusual with Allplan in my experience but new users (myself included) will usually manage to press some weird combination of commands that may cause a crash.
  (I am assuming you are running Windows NT4 or (better) Windows 2000 and are moderately familier with the jargon of using a PC - and do not have ready access to qualified help)
  
  Scenario 1 - 'simple crash' , do not simply reboot and carry on. Do yourself a favour and run the 'chkdsk' utility with the /f switch ('Start->Run and type in chkdsk c: /f replacing 'C' with which ever is the hard disk Allplan is installed on). A command window may open asking you to press 'Y' to confirm - do this and hit 'Return'. Now do a reboot - i.e. Restart. Leave Windows to do it's thing and eventually all should be well. You might also run the 'hotline tool' from Services FT 'cleanstd'. It resets a lot of 'factory defaults' but does not upset your custom toolbars (in fact nothing seems to upset them - even a complete uninstall!)
  
  Scenario 2 - Slightly worse than above - probably my own fault for bringing a bitmap into an Allplan project directory via Windows Explorer - accessing a drawing file linked to a bitmap would crash the whole system. I cured this by running the checks listed above and then using 'Project Pilot' to create a new project and copy the drawing files into that - interestingly it would only work if I copied just the drawing files and NOT the filesets.
  
  Scenario 3 - I have had 2 very serious crashes during 10 months where something happens to corrupt the Windows registry* - not doing anything complex and the mouse cursor starts acting up and if you exit the program Allplan starts replicating until Windows runs out of resources. The 'fixes' mentioned above are not enough in this case - although they should be run anyway.
  The first time I eventally cured this by switching to my second installation of Windows 2000 and copying back the registry backup I had made of the main Windows 2000 installation.
  
  On the second occasion (today!) about 6 months later I did not feel that my registry backup was recent enough and so uninstalled Allplan and then reinstalled it (along with the Wacom tablet driver I use just in case that was causing a problem.)
  
  Sure enough a complete uninstall/reinstall of Allplan seems to have fixed it (project files are quite safe as long as you don't go deleting things in Windows Explorer) - and a pleasant surprise was that after the reinstallation I opened Allplan and I was back in the same project I was originally working on before the trouble started - phew..!
  Needless to say I am now backing up my registry more frequently...
  
  Latest [April 2001] view on dealing with Allplan crashes/lockups - after a number of minor (?) crashes due to things like deleting a lot of segments in a polyline or lockups after using the freehand line tool I have established a procedure that seems to avoid any subsequent problems. As above the first response is to run chkdsk x: /f (where x is your system partition) which will involve a reboot, then run chkdsk y: /f (where y is your data partition). For good measure I then run Microsoft Regclean - which usually reports no errors in the Registry (phew!) - not everyone likes this utility but I've seldom had a problem with it - and just for completeness I run the hotline tool 'Cleanup' which initialises the display but more importantly resets the opening project to the first, blank one in the list. So far this approach has avoided any corruption of the registry by crashes - data corruption is rare - in fact (touch wood) I have never lost drawing data in Allplan.
  
  Latest [February 2002] view on dealing with Allplan crashes/lockups - very rare to have a crash now - the only thing I notice that can be unstable is when using the auto-trace function to find regions for the smartfit tools - very occasionally this can become confused and can crash - but (touch wood) it never seems to affect any data and Allplan reboots to the previously saved project - just to be sure however I normally run all the checks suggested above.
  Another utility I have come across is 'Reghealer' from http://www.zoneutils.com along with several other nice utilities. I dont' know if it improves stability of the Registry but neither have I had any problems caused by using it to clean up and correct registry entries.
  Also I notice in the Cinema 4D technical support forum a comment implying that Wacom drivers are a source of instability - thus as I use an A3 Wacom Intuos tablet for drawing with Allplan some of my experiences may be caused by the Wacom driver - certainly the freehand sketching lockup I now suspect is caused by using the Wacom.
  
  
  Technical appendix:
  *If you do not understand 'the registry'... you are not alone!
  

  The MS Windows Registry (sometimes referred to as 'the giant .ini file from hell' !)

  The Windows registry is the set of initialisation files used by Windows (98/ME/NT/2000) to store all it's settings. Under Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 it is not very easy to back up the registry while the system is running (there are some tools to do it - search www.ntfaq.com if you are interested) - if (as recommended) the file system is NTFS rather than FAT32 or FAT16 then it is going to be very difficult to gain access to your hard disk (see sysinternals site) if the system becomes corrupted. Therefore it is recommended that you have a minimal second installation of NT4 or Windows 2000 on a separate hard disk partition to allow you to get access to your hard disk if things go seriously wrong - and this also allows backing up of the main registry (the files to back up are those within the 'winnt/system32/config' folder.)

  And if you want to get really techie about how to 'properly' install Windows 2000 how about this... Extract from Executive software newsletter The fact of the matter is that manufacturers and consultants are sending out preinstalled systems with the least-efficient configuration when they send out FAT-32 Windows 2000 machines. A few months ago, I bought a new home machine with Windows 2000 preinstalled. Here's what I did when I got it home: (1) Boot to DOS and ZAPped the drive (see http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm). (2) Installed Windows 2000 from the CD to a 2GB FAT-16 volume. (3) Booted to the 2GB FAT Windows 2000 installation (4) Used FORMAT to create a 4GB NTFS 4K cluster D: drive. (5) Installed Windows 2000 from the CD to the 4GB NTFS volume. (6) Booted to the 4GB NTFS Windows 2000 installation. (7) Installed Diskeeper and ran a boot-time on both installations. (8) Booted to the 4GB NTFS Windows 2000 installation. (9) Created 2 more NTFS 4K cluster volumes on the rest of Drive 0. (10) Proceeded to install the rest of my software onto drive E:. Note that this procedure gives me a backup boot of Windows 2000 (on the C: drive) as well as a 4K-cluster NTFS boot. This is really the best of both worlds.

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