Visio 2003 appears to stop responding and takes a long time to save the drawing when you save a large Visio 2003 drawing as an AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg)

When you save a large Microsoft Office Visio 2003 drawing as an AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg), Visio 2003 may appear to stop responding (hang) and Visio 2003 may take a long time to save the drawing.

The DWG converter was rewritten for Visio 2003 and saves a file that has better mapping between Visio 2003 shapes and AutoCAD entities as compared to Microsoft Visio 2002. The new DWG converter causes a better editing experience in AutoCAD and saves the DWG file with a smaller file size.

To work around this problem, do not save your drawing as Drawing (*.vsd) the first time. Instead, save your drawing as AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg) the first time.

The first time that you save a drawing as AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg), the save process is slow. You can then open the new AutoCAD Drawing in Visio 2003 and save the drawing with a new file name and as Drawing (*.vsd). When you save your new drawing as AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg), the save process is faster.

To save a drawing in Visio 2003 as an AutoCAD drawing, follow these steps:

1. Create your drawing in Visio 2003 but do not save the drawing.
2. On the File menu, click Save As.
3. In the Save As dialog box, click AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg) in the Save as type box, type a name for the file in the File name box, and then click Save.

To open your new AutoCAD drawing in Visio 2003, follow these steps:

1. On the File menu in Visio 2003, click Open.
2. In the Open dialog box, click AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg; *.dxf) in the Files of type box, click the DWG file that you saved, and then click Open.
3. After your AutoCAD drawing is open in Visio 2003, click Save As on the File menu.
4. In the Save As dialog box, click Drawing (*.vsd) in the Save as type box, type a new file name in the File name box, and then click Save.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section.

The first part of the conversion process when you save your Visio 2003 drawing as an AutoCAD Drawing converts the Visio 2003 drawing to XML format (the Visio 2003 drawing is converted to XML in memory and may consume lots of memory for large drawings), and Visio 2003 appears to stop responding (hang) with no progress for many minutes, depending on the size of the drawing.

The save process can also take much longer if the XML conversion process runs out of out physical memory (RAM) and therefore starts to page the memory out to the Microsoft Windows page file (memory swapping).

Note If you save your Visio 2003 drawing as XML first, it does not prevent this problem.