I am bringing this to the community because I have not been able to get this resolved through Cadence support so here goes...
Back in early February, several product engineers running Windows 7 on Dell laptops at the large company I work at downloaded and installed Allegro Free Physical Viewer 16.6. We needed to upgrade to 16.6 to be able to open .brd created by our PCB layout group, who recently updated their layout tool. We use Allegro Free Physical Viewer to review PCB layouts prior to ordering them so it is important to be able to open them conveniently.
Since February 12, 2013, no one has been able to run Allegro Free Physical Viewer 16.6. There is an error screen at start up that says "The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail." Because of this error, we have been unable to review files on our own PC. This is going on 5 weeks now.
Nothing we have done has fixed this. Cadence support has sent me to several websites to download 3rd party software patches ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=200B2FD9-AE1A-4A14-984D-389C36F85647&displaylang=en & http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=766a6af7-ec73-40ff-b072-9112bab119c2) as well as download a patched(?) version of Allegro Free Physical Viewer at http://www.cadence.com/downloads/allegro/16.6/allegro_free_viewer_16-6.zip. None of these things have worked.
Has anyone else seen this problem? Has anyone solved this problem?
Thanks,
Kevin