Revit 2011 Crashing when loading families

There appears to be a particular setting within Revit that causes Revit 2011 to crash when loading families. This appear to be either a Windows XP issue or a 32 bit issue. I haven't had this problem with my Windows 7 64bit OS, but have seen this on numerous Windows XP (32 bit) systems.

The Issue...

When you load a family into Revit 2011, if your 'views' are set to Thumbnail within your dialogue when you browse, then it could be that your project crashes.

It appears also that Revit stores how your 'Views' are set (eg: if you are previewing thumbnails of your Families or 'Details' or 'List' view. Some Machines that default to 'Details' you should only see Revit crash the once, however on other Machines where Revit apparently saves the the setting of your viewing of those files, Revit will constantly crash whenever you try to load a Family in.

Solution/Workaround...

At present I am not ware where in Revit you are able to ensure that this view is always returned to displaying the files details, so this solution will have to work around this for now.

Procedure:

• Launch Revit and go straight into Options.
• On the file locations tab, you will find a 'Places...' button. Click this button.
  This allows you to add additional Library locations.
• Click the + icon on the left hand side of the dialogue.
• For this new Library, click into the 'Library Path' and browse to a location not containing any families eg: C:\

• Move this Library to the top of the dialogue using the ' Move Row' icon

• OK out of options
• Now go to load a component, this will default you to browsing to your new library location.

• Change the way you are displaying files to 'Details'. Now load a component to permanently fix the display.

Basically if the Machine remains on Thumbnails and finds a location that has Revit files/families within it it would crash.
Now you have set your Computer to default to view files as 'details' do not change this.

• You can now delete the new library from your Places.

From now on when you load a family it will default to the original Library location and will be set to display 'Details'.

This is a known problem and is a carryover bug from 2010, which apparently should be fixed in the next update of 2011.

Written By: Ian Howard
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