menu items not responding-ArchiCAD 11

[Anonymous]

I have recently developed problems accessing certain menu items:

- creative imaging>photorendering settings, and
- element settings>materials.

They have worked in the fairly recent past, but now don't function at all?
It happens on project files and also with default templates or projects created with "new and reset all".
Occassonally the computer will also freeze and / or crash out of ArchiCAD when trying to access these two items.
All the other items in these menus seem to come up except these two.
I have tried reinstalling and repairing-still the same problem.

Any help appreciated or if anyone else has had similar problems?

[Dwight]

This is highly unusual.

In view of the radical fixes you have already applied, all i can further suggest is to delete all of the Archicad preference files, of which there are at least two.

[Thomas Holm]

AFAIK, Win XP Home isn't certified for AC11. But to me this sounds like a permissions issue. AC needs full read and write permissions for all of its folder and sub-folders.

[Anonymous]

Thanks guys- I tried unchecking the read-write permissions for the ArchiCAD 11 folder (and everything in it) and still have the same problems. I'm not sure where to delete the ArchiCAD preference files? There's some .xml files in >defaults>archicad>work environment>user profiles, but I'm hesitant about touching any of this.

The issue may indeed be my out of date system / machine (I don't think the video card is OPEN GL friendly (so I usually immediately switch to the internal rendering engine) and I'm only running XP home- this setup has been coping for <ArchiCAD 10, but has been giving me a few headaches since. I may have been dreaming when I thought that these menus were working in V11 as I'm frequently switching back to V9 for some projects- so they may never have worked in V11 (although they do for V10). I might try upgrading to XP pro- or do you reckon the video card is more likely to be the problem- in which case I'll hold out for a new machine (with OEM XP pro as well of course!) As usual the problem for me may lay in trying to keep my computer up to speed with the software updates.

[Thomas Holm]

You've got too little RAM as well, and so on. I'd guess it's cheaper to buy a new budget box that fulfills the requirements than to upgrade your old one.

[Anonymous]

I once tried to use AC 10 on a machine with a Matrox Parhelia card, and it either froze or bluescreened, so I am not very optimistic.

Anssi