Autodesk Inventor Professional 2015: Serious error: VBA failed to initialize properly. Please restart Inventor.
It’s the same story all over again. While preparing installation instructions for Autodesk Inventor Professional 2015, for my students, I came across an error I thought would have been fixed by now.
This posting is based on the installation files made available at Autodesk Education Community, and these files are named Autodesk_Inventor_2015_English_Win_64bit_R1_dlm_001_002.sfx.exe and Autodesk_Inventor_2015_English_Win_64bit_R1_dlm_002_002.sfx.exe.
On the first and each subsequent run, Autodesk Inventor Professional 2015 may complain loudly about:
Serious error: VBA failed to initialize properly. Please restart Inventor.
Serious error
VBA failed to initialize properly. Please restart Inventor.
In fact, you are presented with 4 instances of the same error message before Inventor finally shows up. However, Inventor is pretty much unable to perform.
Well, you may restart Inventor until your face turns blue. The proper and only solution is to shut down Inventor and reinstall the VBA 7 modules using either 3rdParty\x64\VBA\Vba7.msi or 3rdParty\x86\VBA\Vba7.msi from the installation media or from the proper directory in C:\Autodesk. You should probably run both .msi files as a precaution on 64-bit Windows.
As this error also affected Autodesk Inventor Professional 2014, I began to wonder if this issue can easily be avoided by manually running 3rdParty\x64\VBA\Vba7.msi and/or 3rdParty\x86\VBA\Vba7.msi prior to running the main installation program.
I was able to verify this hypothesis on a clean Windows 7 SP1 running in VirtualBox, which incidently is the same kind of environment I used in the first place to get my screenshots and where I (re)discovered the VBA 7 error.
In other words, two things should happen: one, to ease everyones mind, I’ll change my installation instructions to recommend installing 3rdParty\x64\VBA\Vba7.msi and/or 3rdParty\x86\VBA\Vba7.msi prior to running the main installation program, and, two, Autodesk should overhaul its installation routine for Inventor (Professional) 2015 onwards.