AutoCAD 2002 Truetype Bug - work arounds?

From what I have been told on the Autodesk forums, my AutoCAD 2002
has a known bug where the fonts all change to a truetype font. The
result is the computer slows to a crawl and almost seems locked up, but
I can see the slow regeneration progress on screen. The event seems
random, but is certainly much more likely to happen on a larger drawing
file (in my case over 3meg).

Note that I am running XP with latest service packs. The program is
locally installed, but drawing files are accessed over a network. This
problem has been present and occasionally showing itself for about 6
months now.

Drawings take an extremely long time to regenerate. Editing any text
takes about 1 second for each letter I type to appear in the Mtext
editing window.

When this problem surfaces, even old existing drawings that never had
the problem will show the problem.

I now have two complex drawings where this happens enough that the
drawings have become unusable.

Things I have tried, without success (although some of them will seem
to temporarily fix the problem,but it reappears after a few minutes, or
hours of work);

-Reinstalling all Acad proxy fonts in the Windows font directory.
-Redefining all STYLES to be txt,shx.
-Freezing all layers I am not working on.
-purging auditing and recovering the drawing.
-Opening in IntelliCAD v5 and saving from there.
-Clearing the entire hard drive, reformatting, and installing from
scratch. Deliberately keeping installed programs to a minumum.

On one simpler drawing with this same problem I have attempted more
agressive methods, such as inserting the drawing as a block, into a new
drawing, and exploding it. However, this was only a temporary fix and
the problem resurfaced soon afterwards. Of course, all paperspace
documentation is lost in this process, so it is desirable to avoid it.

Any other ideas about the trigger, or how to work around it?

Joe Dunfee

 

I just noticed that when the problem is active, and I am opening a
new drawing, I get the following on the command prompt;

Substituting [@Arial Unicode MS] for [TXT].
Substituting [@Arial Unicode MS] for [TXT.SHX].
Substituting [@Arial Unicode MS] for [TXT.SHX].

Apparently, AutoCAD is forgetting the location of its SHX files. I
did try putting a copy of the SHX files into the ACAD program
directory. But, later when the problem started right in the middle of
an editing session, it showed that it is just not going to find them,
no matter what directory you place copies of them.

Joe Dunfee