The mysterious ghost of AutoCAD 2015...

In this spooktacular post on Halloween, I recently solved the AutoCAD ghost of 2015....

1. We launched AutoCAD and nothing happened.

2. We then checked the Task Manager and nothing happened.

3. We changed the licensing type from Standalone to Network and still nothing happened.

Finally, we used Procmon to see what was happening and we saw this:

In this case, the system had Adobe Acrobat 9.0 installed which is really old software.  In fact, AutoCAD 2015 may have the following error when starting up if you have Adobe Acrobat 9.5 installed.

http://upandready.typepad.com/up_and_ready/2014/03/autocad-2015-application-error-0xc0000142-autoruns-for-windows-.html

To solve the problem, we uninstalled a component of Adobe Acrobat 9.0 to get AutoCAD to work correctly. Please check out the article below for details:

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/search-result/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/AutoCAD-2015-will-not-start.html

Some other spooktacular posts are noted below:

http://upandready.typepad.com/up_and_ready/2012/10/autodesk-license-borrowing-laptops-windows-7-power-saving.html

http://upandready.typepad.com/up_and_ready/2011/10/autodesk-suites-identifying-your-products-on-the-usb-media-using-the-product-key.html

Thanks to Rod Waller for confirming that this was indeed the issue.