Civil 3D customization can be a wonderful thing, EXCEPT when circumstances ‘break bad’.  Who

among us hasn’t trashed their system at least once in their career?  I’m sure you’ll agree there

is nothing quite like the feeling you get when you see a Ribbon full of question marks!

Fortunately, AutoCAD 2012 ships with a “reset” tool that allows you to restore the installation

to a “factory fresh” state.  Likewise, since Civil 3D 2012 is built on top of AutoCAD 2012, we

can access this same tool to fix a Civil 3D installation that has gone awry.

Here’s how…
First of all, the reset tool I’m talking about can be found in the following folder…
C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012\  It’s called AdMigrator.exe.

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What we’re going to do is create a desktop shortcut that we can use to launch the AdMigrator

program.

Step 1. Right-Click on your desktop and from the menus, select New, and then Shortcut.

Step 2. In the Create Shortcut dialog box, paste the following text (including the quotes)
“C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2012\AdMigrator.exe” /reset
and click Next

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Step 3. Name the shortcut “Reset Civil 3D Settings” and click Finish.  Your desktop shortcut

icon should look like this…

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In the future, if you need to reset your Civil 3D, you can simply double-click the icon.

You’ll be greeted with the following screen…
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Select “Reset Custom Settings” and Civil 3D will launch the Secondary Installer, thus putting

your Civil 3D back to a “freshly installed” state.  Civil 3D will automatically launch when

finished.

WE’RE NOT DONE YET!

Don’t forget that the AdMigrator.exe Tool is an AutoCAD based.  Because of this, you may see the

AutoCAD 2012 title screen when the program launches.  This is because the program (when reset)

is now be pointing to the acad.cuix file.  (Note that after I reset my Civil 3D, my interface,

and workspaces, reflect a vanilla AutoCAD installation.)

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To correct this, we simply need to point the software to the Civil3D.cuix file.

Here’s how…
Type OPTIONS and press Enter to open up the Options Dialog Box.

On the Files tab, open the Customization Files group, and then click the [+] to view the Main

Customization File setting.  Click to select this path, and then click the Browse button.

In the support folder, select the C3D.cuix file (this is the file that contains all of the Civil

3D workspaces and tools) and click Open and then OK.
(Don’t worry, the Ribbon tools may disappear, this is because Civil 3D doesn’t know which

workspace to use.)

Finally, CLOSE Civil 3D, and then re-open it such that everything is re-initialized and

reloaded.

As you can see, Civil 3D is now back to normal, with all of the workspaces.
The only thing you are missing at this point is the “new car smell” :)