I recently installed ChemDraw Professional 17.1 on my imac (new iMac, latest OS) and find that many of my old document are not recognized if I try to open them from ChemDraw. I can right-click on the document and open them fine but if I modify and try to save, I get the spinning ball forever.

Also, new documents don't get a proper icon. It's just a default sheet. If I do a get info, it shows a different icon. I've tried the fix of changing the icon and appying universally and it doesn't seem to work. They seem to like the Avagadro icon.

I've thrown away everything ChemDraw, restarted and done a clean install.

I've been using ChemDraw since beta 0.87 so I'm not a confused newbie. Lots of flakiness with ChemDraw 17.1 on the mac.

Everything about 17.1 works fine on the PC. Same files show the right icons, open and save fine, etc.

Hmmm! I seem to have solved the problem. I threw away everything associated with Avogadro and all seems right with the world. The little icons started changing everywhere and the file, that would give a spinning ball when saved, started behaving.

And I spelled Avogadro right in this post.

Now to see if I can reinstall Avogadro without messing everything up again.

I had a similar problem, Avogadro relablled all my recent chemdraw files as Avogadro files. I deleted that software but now i have thousands of chemdraw files that chemdraw no longer recognizes as chemdraw files. So cant click on a file and have chemdraw open it, big problem!!

I am having the same problem (Chemdraw 17.1 crash-on-save) and it is killing me. I do have Avogadro installed, so I will try this remedy out and report back. I think that there should be a way to get .cdx files associated with chemdraw again, @bmcnelis! I will try and let you know.

I can verify that deleting Avogadro (in my case, an old version, 0.98) fixed the crash-on-save bug. @bmcnelis, my computer decided that .cdx files should be associated with Chemdraw 16 (still hanging around), but I could fix that by

1. Choosing a .cdx file and doing command-I (get info)

2. On the "open with" list, choose Chemdraw Prime 17.1.app from the drop-down list

3. Click the "Change All..." button

Thanks to @methano for posting this - saved me a lot of work on what was an obscure bug (to me).

Well, I reinstalled Avogadro and slowly but surely, the ChemDraw icons have been replaced by Avogadro icons. But double-clicking on the icons seems to open the correct program. So I don't know whose fault this is, Avogadro, ChemDraw or Apple.

Sadly, I am still getting intermittant crash-on-save and crash-on-close with 17.1. I am working on a figure for publication, so I am a little irate right now about it. Any other ideas? Avogadro is long gone from my system, but using the "Default Apps" add-on preference pane, I just noticed that .cdx was assigned to nothing and .cdxml was assigned to BBEdit (how helpful!). I will post if this fixes things, but it seems that it could be related to system defaults for extensions. Not sure why it wasn't a problem with earlier chemdraw versions!

Nope. Now it is consistently crashing on save, even for minor edits, again. I am out of ideas - is there a way to go back to Chemdraw 17.0 or 16 or 15? Those were much less problematic. I really wish it wasn't "one step forward, two steps back" so often with Chemdraw. It is the most problematic program I use, even though it is very mature.

Following the cryptic instructions for what appears to be the same problem with Chemdraw 16 seemed to fix everything for me. Run the command, restart computer when finished.

http://www.cambridgesoft.com/support/DesktopSupport/KnowledgeBase/FAQ/details/Default.aspx?TechNote=3529&KBCats=2&KBTopics=9999&KBOS=Mac

Question:

ChemDraw (Mac) freezes (stops responding) when trying to save an existing ChemDraw file (edit).

Answer:

We have found this issue in some user machine and the workaround for this issue is to reset the launch services database.

To reset the launch services database, open Terminal by going to Applications - Utilities - Terminal in your mac machine and paste the command below:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user ; killall Dock

This may take a while if you have lots of apps (20-30 minutes or more).

Thank-you, Methano, for relating this issue again. This is the first we are hearing of the Avogadro issue effecting ChemDraw v17.1 and we have opened a ticket with our R&D team to review, and see if there is anything we can do to address it.

Regards,

ChemDraw Support Team