Revit 2011 & AutoCAD 2011 Sluggish

And sluggish is a nice word. Revit and AutoCAD slow to a crawl immediately after starting up, and in most cases are unuseable. The other programs running on this computer seem fine, but are affected. Rebooting the system works for a while. Then the problem eventually comes back.

I found that the revit.ini file has a username parameter that is sensitive to what user is logged on to Windows. If this is set differently, a program called Wscommcntr2.exe ( possibly Wscommcntr1.exe ? ) hangs, causing the Autodesk program you are using to stop responding. Killing this program brings back AutoCAD and Revit immediately. Wscommcnter reports data back to Autodesk, I think for bug reports (a little ironic). You can kill this process safely without losing functionality.

This could happen often I imagine if you do like we do, and use "hand me down" computers, where the AutoDesk product is installed under one username, then later used under a different username.

For our purposes, I edited the Revit.ini file, deleted the old username from the line

Username=

And restarted Revit. Revit then filled in the line with the correct username itself, and continued on. No problems since (we hope).