Running Inventor 2011 and 2013 side by side

Our Inventor development staff informed me about the following problem. We have no intention at this point to produce a fix for the problem because the conditions are rather peculiar.

When you work with both 2011 and 2013 on the same machine, you can run into a crash in 2013 when selecting a file in the "Open File dialog" after starting Inventor with the "Run as administrator" command.

The root cause of the crash is the incompatibility between infotip.dll (from 2011) and the utx.dll (from 2013) and the fact that under above conditions, Inventor 2013 tries to work with the infotip.dll from 2011.

The infotip.dll is used when you hover over an Inventor file in Windows Explorer:

Fig 1: Infotip functionality provided by Infotip.dll

Of course one rather drastic measure to avoid the crash is to uninstall 2011 and work with 2013 exclusively.

Another less drastic way to get rid of the problem is to unregister the infotip.dll in 2011 and work without infotip functionality in 2011.

To unregister the infotip on Inventor 2011, do the following:

1. Click on the Windows Start menu
2. Enter "cmd" (without quotes) to open a command line window
3. In the window type "regsvr32 –u C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2011\bin\infotip.dll" and press Enter.

You might need to change the string C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2011\bin\infotip.dll if you have installed 2011 in a non-default location.  

Note that at any time you can restore the infotip functionality by running following command in the command window

"regsvr32 C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Inventor 2011\bin\infotip.dll"

Bob

Comments

[Klaas De Smedt]

Thanks a lot!
We are planning to install Inventor 2013 on several machines next moth that also have Inventor 2010, 2011 & 2012 installed.

[Bob]

No problem Klaas. The conditions for the crash are a bit far fetched. I don't think a lot of users will use "Run as administrator" to start Inventor. But at least you are warned :-)
Bob

[john bennett]

this is a question ,if you are running inventor 64 does this change anything about the command

[Bob]

The command remains the same on 64 bit machines.
Bob

[hotel sur paris]

Thanks a lot!
We are planning to install Inventor 2013 on several machines next moth that also have Inventor 2010, 2011 2012 installed.
+1