Civil 3D 2011 ANZ comes complete with “virus”

Civil 3D 2011 ANZ comes complete with “virus”

If you install Civil 3D 2011 using the ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) profile, when you start it up for the first time, you will see a large warning indicating that the drawing requires an Asian language pack to be installed. It also warns that this is a symptom of the acad.vlx virus:

Language Pack warning

Now I know that in this case it’s not an actual virus causing the problem, but rather the ANZ template drawing being “infected” with this Language Pack requirement. I have had to deal with quite a few incoming drawings in this state, and that’s painful enough without Autodesk also infecting every Australasian Civil 3D drawing with the problem. Other profiles may be similarly infected, but at the moment I don’t know. Edit: Matt Anderson reports that the problem occurs on US systems too.

Autodesk, I suggest that as a matter of great urgency you create a clean ANZ template file, post it as a hotfix and warn all your Civil 3D customers of the SNAFU. Neither “install the language pack” nor “turn off the warning” are adequate workarounds. Your customers do not want to send out or receive any drawings in this state.

Beyond the immediate issue of Autodesk shipping software that on first use warns the user that they may have a virus (and encourages the creation of drawings that spread that warning far and wide), I would appreciate some assistance in dealing with “infected” drawings, whether in Civil 3D or plain AutoCAD.

First, I need to be able to detect such drawings using LISP so I ensure they are rejected rather than allowed into our drawing management system, and this detection will need to work in releases at least as far back as AutoCAD 2004.

Second, I need a mechanism of cleaning up such drawings. The only thing I have discovered that works so far is the manual, time-consuming and dangerous process of recreating the drawings by starting from scratch and Copy/Paste in each layout. With big jobs using nested xrefs, this is fraught. I need to be able to provide a LISP-based cleanup mechanism that I can set up to work in batch mode on a set of drawings.

I would be grateful for any clues anyone might have about the above detect & cleanup needs.

Edit: see the comments for further important information.

6 Comments

  1. Matt Anderson

    Steve –

    For AutoCAD Civil 3d and Civil 2010, Update 3 will provide the fix to the drawing AFTER saving on a patched system. Its not a ANZ specific error as we get it in the States as well. I know our custom template has the error, and I am in the process of installing and removing the error.

    Matt

  2. Dana Judge

    There is a hotfix awaiting release for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011. For all releases you will need to open the drawing files with the fixes, save and upon reopen the Missing Language Pack dialog will no longer appear.

  3. Dana, thanks. I see the Civil 3D 2009 and 2010 open/save fixes are now available, so I guess the 2011 one can’t be too far away. In addition to providing a cleanup mechanism, it’s important to ensure that the source is also removed by fixing the templates. Is that part of the plan?

    Although Civil 3D is one source of the “infestation”, it would appear to not be the only one. Also, users of AutoCAD-based broducts other than Civil 3D are going to have to clean up the problem drawings. Can you please check with your colleagues to see if the other AutoCAD variants are going to be similarly fixed?

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