BenMerritt

It depends a great deal on the specifics of the situation; I'm not aware of any "one size fits all" solution. If possible, I'd recommend building a stripped-down plan (e.g. one with just a filled rectangle that exhibits the issue) and either posting it here or submitting a ticket to Tech Support.

Are you using a fill pattern? Depending on various quirks of your PDF print driver, PDF viewer, etc., tight pattern fills may looks different at certain zoom levels due to differences in how various programs implement anti-aliasing.

If you're looking specifically at the "hidden user settings" folder (C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Local\Chief Architect Premier X17), then yes, I'd expect that to be owned by your own user account rather than SYSTEM. However, it's very unlikely that the permissions on the folder are related to Chief's slow performance. Under certain circumstances, they might theoretically cause crashes, although I haven't verified that.

Beautiful. The good old "universal error message." The fact that you've able to run it as an administrator does suggest that it's some kind of permissions issue with some file, whether that's one of the installed program files, one of the multi-user data files, or one of the per-user files. I'd probably do the following: Check the permissions on your "hidden user settings" folder. It's usually at "C:\Users\(your username)\AppData\Local\Chief Architect Premier X17". Right-click on that folder, go to Properties → Security → Advanced, and make sure that your account is listed as the owner near the top of that dialog. Check the "Message Log" file in that folder to see if there are any log messages from the last time you tried to launch the program as a non-admin. If there are, there may be some clues as to which file is causing the trouble. If not, I'd try a clean reinstall of the program to make sure that the issue isn't one of the installed program files (e.g. the ones under "C:\Program Files\Chief Architect").

What happens when you try to run it as non-admin? My best guess is that some data file under your user directory has gotten marked as "owned by admin" by a previous run of Chief as administrator. If so, locating the file and changing its permissions/ownership should sort that out.

You'd be at the standard SSA renewal rate, $695.00 per year.

We've supported customized SSA renewal quotes for some time. The main use case is to allow larger organizations with multiple licenses to synchronize their SSA renewal dates or to adjust the list of licenses for which they're renewing their SSA. By default, only licenses that are configured for manual renewal within the next year will receive a quote, but our Sales team can put together a quote for other scenarios, e.g. early renewal on an auto-renewed license.

It looks like your SSA is configured for automatic renewal. We sent a reminder notice on November 29, so you may want to check whether you received it, as we'll use the same e-mail address to notify you if anything goes wrong with the scheduled payment. If you have further questions or would like to make changes to your renewal preferences, I'd recommend that you contact our sales department at 208-292-3400 or sales@chiefarchitect.com.

If you don't have easy access to the currently activated computer, it's also possible to deactivate remotely from your Digital Locker. This knowledge base article covers the procedure.

In my experience, C:\ProgramData shouldn't be stored in the cloud. Windows 11 likes to put many of your user folders (Documents, Pictures, etc.) in OneDrive, but I've never seen it try to sync files outside the user directory. You might try creating a new empty folder under "C:\ProgramData\Chief Architect Premier X16" to verify that your user account is able to access the directory outside of Chief Architect.

Cases like this particular one are tricky to model automatically because of topological issues; we try to punch a hole in some of the generated ceiling planes, but if that hole goes right up to the edge of the ceiling plane into which we're trying to punch it, that breaks the geometric representation. If you add the tray ceiling before the fireplace and then explode the tray ceiling, you may be able to manually edit the ceiling planes to achieve the effect you're looking for.

I'd still expect the performance overhead to be relatively close to that of 100 text objects without the hyperlinks. I haven't benchmarked that or looked through that part of the code, though; that's just my intuition based on the general principles by which our text objects tend to operate.

I'm not the one who implemented the hyperlinking features, but I'd be surprised if they caused a measurable performance difference while working with the plan, especially if you're not adding hundreds or thousands of them.

The default behavior is to reference the PDF as an external file rather than embedding it in the plan file. This has relatively little effect on how quickly the PDF draws in a plan view, but it does affect the plan file's size and the speed of some other operations (e.g. undo/redo). For those operations, referring to an external file should generally be faster.

Out of curiosity, when was the last time you tested this? We made some significant improvements to PDF rendering performance in X13. There are still cases where performance can suffer — printing being one of them — but when just importing a PDF as a drawing reference, the software should be much more responsive than in prior versions.