Doh! NVIDIA Driver Leaves acad.exe Running After Close

On Sunday morning, I debugged acad.exe lingering in Task Manager post-shutdown, linked to an NVIDIA driver. Disabling hardware acceleration in AutoCAD/Civil 3D resolved the issue. A clean installation of the driver also fixed the problem, which I confirmed through a newly found knowledge base article on the matter.

Task Manager window displaying running processes, highlighting the AutoCAD Application.

Spent much of my Sunday morning debugging acad.exe left in task manager after shutdown and traced the process to a NVIDIA driver. Had the support ticket written, then found a KB. Found you can diagnose it by going into AutoCAD/Civil 3D and disabling hardware acceleration in GRAPHICCONFIG and problem goes away on shutdown.

Found a fix that if you install the driver using the Custom Install> Clean option it is fixed.

NVIDIA graphics driver installation window showing version 596.72, with options for custom installation and driver components including Graphics Driver, HD Audio Driver, and USBC Driver.

 Just found a KB article this morning 🙁

AutoCAD products continues to run in the background in Task Manager after closing

Shaan Hurley
Shaan Hurley
Articles: 4670

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