Hello Community,
I have been building AutoCAD OEM applications for almost a decade, but with AutoCAD OEM 2025, I felt almost like a newbie (until today).
When running the OemMakeWizard and starting with a very basic oem application, the OemMakeWizard would simply crash after few seconds. That has been very unprecedented in my experience.
Today, with the help of the ADN (thanks, Madhu!) I finally figured out the reason for this crash.
Can you spot the difference?
Here, we see the OemMakeWizard desktop icons right after installation. Up until (and including) OEM 2024, the OemMakeWizard will be run as Admin with priviledged rights when started from the desktop links.
That has been changed (probably unintentionally) with AutoCAD OEM 2025. When running the OemMakeWizard with the link from the desktop, the application will NOT run with admin rights. During the oem build process, the OemMakeWizard creates some stamping and other files and needs admin rights to write the files to disk. Missing admin rights will just crash the application (instead of, like, showing a warning message).
When I first used the new AutoCAD OEM 2025 OemMakeWizard , I just assumed that it would work like all the other versions. In my excitement (and later desperation), I failed to notice that the Windows UAC (User Access Control) would not ask for permission to run this as admin, like it did with the other older versions.
To remedy this, just set the desktop icon to run as administrator:
This is not a threat!
Another issue I encountered after my newly reaquired ability to build oem applications is the sudden interference of the Windows Defender. When building an oem application, the Windows Defender may detect some malicious code on two occasions. I say “may” on purpose, because I have had a virtual machine where the Defender spoke up, on another machine the Defender was quite.
We can safely assume that Autodesk will not publish anything that will be malicious or dangerous. Autodesk knows about this behaviour and they take this very serious.
Update to threat detection
According to Autodesk, they where not able to reproduce the Windows Defender threat detection. Also, it seems that I was the lucky and only one to experience this behavior with the Windows Defender when building the AutoCAD OEM application. They believe, and I concure, that this has been a false positive threat detection. You can follow the below outlined steps, or just add the oemmakewizard.exe to the Windows Defender exclusion list.Disable Inplace Server
The first threat comes from a small application called by the OemMakeWizard that updates type libraries for ActiveX Control features. Disabling the Inplace Server will make this threat go away. You should disable this anyway if you don’t need this feature at all.
Ignore the last threat
The second threat results from another appliaction called by the OemMakeWizard that updates the version info. We can safely ignore the warning from the Windows Defender, because the oem applications is building fine and running without (noticed) problems.
If you want to make sure that everything will be building ok without triggering any thread warning from the Windows Defender, you can exclude the oem installation folder. Got to Windows Security > Virus & threat protection > Manages settings (at Virus & threat protection settings) > Exclusions > Add or remove exclusions.
Conclusion
To summarize this expierience:
Always question and reflect your assumptions!
Otherwise, it can cost you dearly!
(In my case, a couple of days with intense headaches and desperation)
Having read this, you probably won’t make the same dumb mistake that I did!