possible alternative to forward merge for corrupt AC files

[Eduardo Rolon]

background
About two months ago I had some problems with linking from PM to AC because of a "magic wand" hole in a slab that had as a result that both AC and PM crashed when either generating a section or updating files. At the time I uninstalled AC and PM and kept getting the error even doing the forward merge solution. Found the culprit (slab) and everything started to work fine again,BUT
A new error started to pop up with files created before the reinstall of AC. The error was that when opening the exiting pre_reinstall file AC would stop loading and I had to open the library (under the file menu) reload it and then the AC file will finish loading. The other error was when updating PM to the same AC file it would cause BGAC to hang and PM would hang as a followup.
solution
It has been documented that using the forward merge trick will clean an AC file but you would have to recreate the views since the views would not merge.
Today I had the AC problem with an older file. I had to add a new text label to one of the views, I copied one and edited it and noticed that the layer info said that the layer was off, but since I could copy and edit it I did not think it was a problem. When I went to update the layout I got the BGAC hang, so I reopened the file in AC and got the frozen file situation, resaved the file, relinked the file in PM, BGAC and PM hung up. Before resigning to use a forward merge and redefine the views I decided to try the following:
1) Open the problem file
2) Save the file as an archive (.pla)
3) Open the archive- with the read elements from archive option
4) Resave the file as a PLN (all views are present) with a different name
5) Relink file in PM
6) Update
It Worked. I noticed that the new label that I had included in the file was gone (apparently there was a problem with it). I opened the file in AC put the note back in and updated the file in PM without problems.

I don't know if this has been discussed before or if it will work with other corrupted AC files but it is an option to try.