Inventor 2013 stress analysis file bloat

**********************************************************
Update: the file bloat issue not only affects the Stress Analysis add-in but also affects users that use the Inventor Optimization add-in.
**********************************************************

To anyone using the stress analysis module in Inventor Professional 2013, I wanted to inform you that we just found out that the file size will increase substantially because instead of storing the stress results in separate files, due to a defect, Inventor stores the stress results inside the ipt file.
You can run into this situation if the FEAFileHandler.exe program is not registered correctly on your machine.

We are working on a hotfix for this issue but in the meantime to avoid future file bloat, you will have to manually register the FEAFileHandler.exe program.

When you have installed Inventor2013 to the default location, run following command from a command window:

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2013\Bin\FEAFilesHandler.exe" /regserver

Change the string "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2013" if you have installed Inventor in a different location.

Above operation only prevents the problem from happening again so if you also want to reduce the file size of files that have been affected by this, you can take these additional steps:

1. Delete the FEA simulation data folders for the affected files.
   These are subfolders in the location where your FEA parts are stored and they have the same name as the FEA parts.

   Example: if your part is stored as c:\workspace\test.ipt , the FEA (.fres) and mesh (.fmsh) files will reside in c:\workspace\test\AIP\FEA

2. If you have FEA files in your %temp% folder from a previous solve, delete them.
3. Open Inventor and for each existing 'bloated' model file with a simulation, do the following:
   1. Open the file and skip the request to find the missing linked files.
   2. Use the 'Tools > Links' command and delete the OLE links for all stress analysis files ( .fins, .fsat, .ftes, .fwiz, .fmsh, .fres).
   3. Save the file.
   4. Enter the Stress Analysis environment and re-run the simulation – this should take some time to recreate all of the results.
   5. Save the file again.
   6. Check the 'Tools > Links' command again – the 'link size' should now be much smaller

Cheers

Bob