Issue

When starting AutoCAD or opening a drawing, it's crashing, freezing, or is generally slow or unresponsive. You may also be experiencing an unresponsive or frozen cursor.

You might receive the message: Error: The application was unable to start correctly.

Causes & Solutions

AutoCAD, F/X CAD, or Civil 3D can become unresponsive for any number of reasons, or accompanied by a variety of possible error messages. Here are links to a few, including their solutions:

AutoCAD, F/X CAD, or Civil 3D 2017:

We've seen the following instances of CAD crashing that are particular to the 2017 version:

• CAD crash is accompanied by a Fatal Error: Unhandled Access Violation Reading ... Exception message
• CAD crashes after you load the menus

General instances of CAD freezing or crashing:

• AutoCAD or F/X CAD freezes on startup when trying to activate (license)
• AutoCAD or F/X CAD freezes or crashes with a drawing that includes gradients
• AutoCAD or F/X CAD crashes or freezes when you click the File menu
• Fatal Error: Unhandled delayload
• The AutoCAD Block Editor is being extremely slow
• Error: The application was unable to start correctly
• System error: The program can't start because VCOMP100 DLL is missing
• Unable to open a drawing file at all
• CAD freezes or crashes when you attempt to attach an Xref or insert a block (INSERT command) from a shortcut folder on a remote server
• Fatal error: 0x0000 when starting AutoCAD or F/X CAD
• AutoCAD or F/X CAD freezes when you're working with or selecting hatches
• AutoCAD or F/X CAD crashes or freezes when you run our Nuke tool
• AutoCAD or F/X CAD crashes and won't open, and you receive a message beginning with Internal Error 2330. 1992
• AutoCAD or F/X CAD freezes or crashes when you turn Ortho mode on
• AutoCAD or F/X CAD crashes when you try to place a hatch – but only when the Land F/X menus are loaded
• AutoCAD or F/X CAD is slow or crashes with a drawing that contains splines
• AutoCAD freezes or crashes when you attempt to import plants, Concept Plants, Reference Notes, details, or irrigation equipment from a project or template – and your office has Cloud Data
• You attempted to open a Land F/Xor AutoCAD tool, and CAD appears to freeze. You can stop it from freezing by pressing the ESC key, but you are unable to use the tool and any relevant dialog box or manager is not visible
• Unhandled exception has occurred in a component in your application. ... Application does not support just-in-time (JIT) debugging. See the end of this message for details.
• AutoCAD Civil 3D crashes or freezes after you open a drawing
• CAD crashed or froze when you tried to run the Publish or Batch Plot command, possibly accompanied by a Fatal Error message.
• CAD crashed or froze when you tried to switch between Model Space and Paper Space. You may have also seen a Not Responding message.
• You opened a Land F/X or AutoCAD tool (such as the Plant Manager) and are unable to see the appropriate dialog box, and CAD crashed or froze
• AutoCAD froze or began to run slowly after you trued using either our Plant Outlines or Exclude Shrubs tool

For detailed information on what to do when AutoCAD fails to start, see the official Autodesk solution for AutoCAD freezing or crashing.