AutoCAD Plant 3D custom tool palettes are not being saved

Issue:

You have added a new tool palette group with one or more palettes in AutoCAD Plant 3D 2020 (might also affect earlier and later Plant 3D releases and also vanilla AutoCAD installations). When you close Plant 3D and re-open it later, the added tool palettes are missing.

Also, at the next startup of Plant 3D the Command line shows 'Failed to get PaletteSet!'

Further, another dialog box pops up that 'A new As-Built for AutoCad version was found'.

Causes:

After testing a clean uninstall/reinstall of Plant 3D 2020, the problem remained.

Permissions were also checked and found to be correct.

The root cause for the problem was suspected to be that the Faro add-in for AutoCAD, identified as 'As-Built for AutoCAD 2020' was not installed successfully. This issue did not occur in Plant 3D 2019 on the same machine that did not have As-Built for AutoCAD loaded.

Solution:

Solution 1) To resolve this error, As-Built for AutoCAD 2020.1 can be uninstalled from the Programs and Features in the Windows Control Panel. This was confirmed to resolve the issue. After uninstalling the As-Built add-in, the custom tool palettes were retained between sessions of Plant 3D.

Alternatively, it may be possible to unload the following partial customization groups by running the command KUBT_SELECT_KUBIT_BOX_VERSION from the Plant 3D command line. (This was not tested).

Below are the 9 partial customization groups that were loaded by 'As-Built for AutoCAD 2020.1'

Also, the installed version 'As-Built 2020.1' was not identified as being installed according to the third image above that pops up at startup. A reinstall source for As-Built for AutoCAD 2020 was not found and was therefore not tested.

Solution 2) It was noticed that the order of the support file search paths for the Tool Palettes mattered. If the Faro link is above the AutoCAD link, then AutoCAD won't retain any new palette tools. But when AutoCAD was listed first, then it works.

                                          Special thanks to Adam LeRoy and Jay Siebert for the research and confirmation for Solution 2.

About the Author

Sr. Technical Support Specialist, Manufacturing<br><br>Bob Felton has been supporting Autodesk products for over 25 years including core AutoCAD, P&ID, Plant 3D, AutoCAD for Mac, AutoCAD Mechanical, and Vault. His background is in graphics with an Applied Sciences degree and ten years manufacturing experience drafting, as well as technical illustration, image editing, and even patent drafting.

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