I'm posting this more for my own reference, in case it happens again. I use ViaCAD V12 Pro, and although it works relatively well most of the time, it's not flawless. It can crash out with some degree of regularity, which has forced me into the habit of saving many, many times during a project (sometimes a hundred or more times). The issue I had today though was much different, and pretty much crippled the ability to export any STL's or STEP, or really anything. I uninstalled it and re-installed it, and even rolled back windows using system restore, but nothing worked. Then I resorted to google, and found the following post, which explained a similar issue, and a fix suggestion - which sadly did not work for the person who started the post, but it did work for me (happily enough). The person with the issue in the post did get their issue resolved though, eventually.
forums.punchcad.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=26930#post26930
To summarize that post, in case it gets lost some day, the author said that ViaCAD stores the location of dialog boxes in a ".ini" file located here (in Windows):
/Users/<accountname>/AppData/Local/Punch!/ViaCAD Pro/VCPDialogs.ini
And by renaming or deleting that file, it will force the program to create a new one, so any corrupted stuff will be wiped away. It turns out that is what fixed my weird issue, since it was the export dialog box that was not showing up. I suspect it had to do with the recent installation of a 3rd monitor in my setup. I have observed strange dialog box behavior with ViaCAD in the past when using multiple monitors, so in hindsight this makes sense. When I went to look at the contents of the old (broken) file, in the export category it had the following location:
[Export]
CurFilter=STL
AllowCollapse=FALSE
LRCollapseMode=NONE
TBCollapseMode=NONE
UpperLeftPos=-506,527
vs the newly generated file, which has this (and this one works):
[Export]
CurFilter=STL
AllowCollapse=FALSE
LRCollapseMode=NONE
TBCollapseMode=NONE
UpperLeftPos=856,507
So it seems that the dialog box was popping up off screen, as the X value was negative. Possibly moving the monitors around, or swapping the primary monitor would have allowed me to see it. In any case, I'm really happy removing/renaming the .ini file worked, since I was about to re-image my PC, and that would have been a bit of work.
forums.punchcad.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=26930#post26930
To summarize that post, in case it gets lost some day, the author said that ViaCAD stores the location of dialog boxes in a ".ini" file located here (in Windows):
/Users/<accountname>/AppData/Local/Punch!/ViaCAD Pro/VCPDialogs.ini
And by renaming or deleting that file, it will force the program to create a new one, so any corrupted stuff will be wiped away. It turns out that is what fixed my weird issue, since it was the export dialog box that was not showing up. I suspect it had to do with the recent installation of a 3rd monitor in my setup. I have observed strange dialog box behavior with ViaCAD in the past when using multiple monitors, so in hindsight this makes sense. When I went to look at the contents of the old (broken) file, in the export category it had the following location:
[Export]
CurFilter=STL
AllowCollapse=FALSE
LRCollapseMode=NONE
TBCollapseMode=NONE
UpperLeftPos=-506,527
vs the newly generated file, which has this (and this one works):
[Export]
CurFilter=STL
AllowCollapse=FALSE
LRCollapseMode=NONE
TBCollapseMode=NONE
UpperLeftPos=856,507
So it seems that the dialog box was popping up off screen, as the X value was negative. Possibly moving the monitors around, or swapping the primary monitor would have allowed me to see it. In any case, I'm really happy removing/renaming the .ini file worked, since I was about to re-image my PC, and that would have been a bit of work.
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