Crashes, Clues, and Two Big Wins From Autodesk CER Files

The past few months have been rough for a few CAD stations. Random crashes. Slow performance. Strange behavior that no amount of driver updates or Windows patches seemed to fix. What finally broke things open was not guesswork or a lucky break. It was Autodesk CER data. The humble userinfo.xml and the DMP files sitting on most every user’s machine.

Updated 12/29/2025
Created a technical reference on what I know based on analyzing Autodesk CER userinfo.,xml files. Can be helpful in analyzing your CER files using data tools like PowerShell, Power BI etc. Autodesk Customer Error Reporting (CER) UserInfo.xml Format Specification

People tend to ignore CER prompts. I get it. It feels like another pop up that slows you down. The truth is simple. CERs help Autodesk see what is happening out in the real world. They also give CAD managers and IT a direct window into problems that do not show up in logs or normal debugging. If you are on 2024 or older, you need to send them in or nothing gets to Autodesk. From 2025 and newer they are sent automatically.
My past article on CER Unlocking Autodesk CER: Essential Data for CAD Managers

I have been pulling these files when a user crashed and recently weekly harvesting and reading through them. The volume of clues in those files is wild. Product versions. Registry paths. Graphics cards. Drivers. Commands. Memory states. Enough detail to map out patterns that would never show up any other way. Two recent issues hit hundreds of users across the network and both were solved by reading CER data. Not by Scooby Doo and the gang. By paying attention to the clues Autodesk already gives us.

The first problem came from old Civil 3D leftovers that refused to die. Civil 3D 2020 does not clean up everything when it is uninstalled. It leaves UPI registry entries behind for shared resources. Later versions of Civil 3D sometimes find those entries and assume the shared material library is in place. When it is not, the software falls over to the old and crashes. Autodesk used to ship a Install Cleanup utility. They retired it. Now they offer pages of manual cleanup steps in knowledge base articles and leave the mess to customers to clean up like a bad houseguest that leaves dirty dishes on the counter and doesn’t flush the toilet after use. You can run the free Microsoft Troubleshooter tool to remove orphaned entries, but you cannot push it silently to every machine across a network. I used CER data to see exactly which users were tripping over the same UPI path. That confirmed the cause and we can clean the machines that need it. A lot of work that a cleaner better Autodesk install/unistall should have handled.

The second problem was a graphics card fight that nobody would have caught by chance. Several Dell laptops ship with an Nvidia RTX card and an Intel Arc chip. CER files showed crash after crash running on Intel Arc even though Nvidia was installed and supported. Once we saw that pattern we set the Nvidia RTX Control Center settings to force AutoCAD and Revit to use the RTX card. That looked right on paper but did not fix the issue. What finally solved it was a Windows graphics setting buried in Display settings. Windows was still set to pick the GPU automatically and kept choosing Intel Arc and overriding the Nvidia control Center. We configured the acad.exe and revit.exe to use the Nvidia card and it fixed the slowdowns and the crashes. These settings were in the registry. One user noticed the speed jump within seconds. Now we have an Intune PowerShell script to test that applies the right GPU assignment for every CAD machine so the same issue does not return.

Without CER files we would still be guessing and crashing Autodesk products. Those two issues were potentially hitting hundreds of users day after day. The CER trail cut through all of it. It showed the old UPI remnants. It showed the wrong GPU. It showed the patterns clearly enough to trust the fix.

My hope is that Autodesk improves install and uninstall behavior. A lot of pain comes from products that do not clean up after themselves. I also hope Autodesk eventually uses AI on the server side to spot patterns in CER data and push real guidance to customers and CAD managers and at the same time improves their products based on the CER data. That kind of help would show real value for the increasing subscription costs.

Until then, keep sending CERs. And when someone on your team crashes, grab the xml and the DMP. Those files tell a story. They are worth reading.

I am now harvesting CER files every week and building a small app that will digest trends across the entire user base. I want to spot bumps early and fix them before they roll through the company.

The lesson is simple. CER files are not noise. They are one of the best tools we have. Use them.