Deploying AutoCAD 2010 via GPO (Part 4)

Or  Death by Application Rollout!

Now that I’m into the testing phase on live machines, all manner of lovely issues seem to crop up. Here’s some of the major ones and how to resolve them.

FATAL ERROR: Unhandled e0434f4dh Exception at 7c812a5bh

This is related to the .NET installs on the local machine. The latest version I have allowed here is 3.5 SP1 and there seems to have been issues with the initial release from MS. A quick an easy resolution to this is to uninstall the SP1, reboot the machine and let it pick up the updated SP1 from WSUS or wherever. In all the cases I’ve had here, this has resolved the issue nicely.

Various DLL, cui / cuix and chm files missing

This was a tough one to figure out but it seems for some reason that the msi package doens’t copy all the dll files down from the install point. To resolve this, I added a start up script to the policy like this:

REM     check if done previously
if exist “c:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2010\dllsynch.flg” exit else
goto copy

:copy
REM    synchronise dll files from install point
start /wait xcopy /d/e/h/c/y “\\domain\dfs\it\Deployment\ACAD2010_Fixed\AdminImage\x86\acad\en-us\Acad\Program Files\Root” “c:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2010\”

REM    create dllsynch.flg to prevent rerun.
echo done > “c:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2010\dllsynch.flg”

Exit

As you can tell I’ve added a bit more into it to synchronise the whole directory. At first it was just the dll files but there was a later issue involving chm and cuix files. No idea why these files don’t make it down to the computer but this seemed to resolve various issues.

New Features Workshop

This was due to missing chm files in the install directory. The script sorted that one out.

Missing acad.chm

This is the help menu which I’m told could be pretty useful and fortunately it’s a simple missing chm file. Thankfully, the script (I’m beginning to think it needs a proper name!) sorted this one out again.

Well, second round of installs is tomorrow so we’ll see how things go. Watch this space as they say. 😉