Introduction
Anyone who uses ANSYS workbench on a regular basis can tell you that it is very “fragile”. By fragile, I mean that it is not difficult to get your ANSYS project corrupted. It is also fairly common to across mysterious recurring errors that may hinder your productivity.
Sometimes the solution for the issue may be simple. Maybe restarting ANSYS fixed the issue. Perhaps you had to restart the computer. Or maybe, it was a simple setting change under options or resetting the layout worked for you. But other times the issues are more dire, and nothing short of a reinstall or even an ANSYS version change helped.
For obvious reasons, reinstalling the software or upgrading the version are not the ideal solutions. This is where resetting the Appdata can come in quite handy and fix a surprising number of issues.
What is Appdata?
Appdata is a folder which contains user specific files for your windows software. Within this folder, there are three subfolders. And the subfolders contain folders for the various software packages installed on your system. There is a folder for ANSYS as well.
So for example, each time you open up ANSYS Mechanical, it comes up a certain way. You have it set up to your liking. The colors, the tool bars etc. are all specific to how you have set them up. The ANSYS Appdata folder is where the information specific to “your” ANSYS products is stored. Sometimes, the user configuration files might get corrupted and need a refresh.
Resetting ANSYS Appdata
Here is how you can reset ANSYS Appdata:
- Exit ANSYS
- Go to Start > Run
- Enter %APPDATA%
- A folder explorer window will open
- Open the Ansys folder
- Look for the Ansys version you are using for example, v211 and rename it to v211_Old
- Launch ANSYS and refresh the project
Hopefully these steps can solve some of your stubborn issues.