ArcGIS 10.4 crashes when opening a 10.3 MXD

[AlexRodriguez]

Just installed ArcGIS desktop on 2 machines.  We upgraded from v10.3 to v10.4.

On my machine I am having no problems (so far).  On the other machine we are having problems opening the MXD's we were using in v10.3.  Some MXD's open without problems.  Other MXD's won't open at all.  The only error message we get says "windows is going to shut down ArcMAP"

I did find something in the Event Viewer on that problem machines.  There it lists 2 files; ArcMap.exe and sdemssqlsrvr.dll

One more thing, the MXD's that won't open on machine 2 open without problems on machine 1.

So far that's all the information I have.  I've been online looking for someone else that has had the same problem.  Nothing so far.

I'm guessing there has to be something in those MXD's that is causing the problem but how do I figure out what that is?

[AaronAbilez]

We definitely know how frustrating this is. The resolution that we came up with was to repair all of your workspaces. Luckily, we didn’t have everyone at 10.4 we still had some machines at 10.3.1 and we used those workstations to repair the data source.

**What we had to do to make this work was to create a new sde database and delete our old one. This consisted of a copy and paste, and this gave us a new connection string.**

Right Click on your database connection to sde.

Select properties.

The highlighted path is what you will need to repair all of your mxd’s.

Right click on mxd that you want to repair.

Select “set data source”

Select all

Replace all

Insert your new file path you received from your connection.

Good luck, I would try to re-set the file path first. Creating a new sde database took us sometime, and was inconvenient for our users when the maps were down. This process was recommended to us by esri support.

[LevinConway]

Ethan,

We have been experiencing a similar problem as you described (user-specific crashes on any machine) and it ended up being a bug that causes ArcMap 10.4.1 to crash if the fully qualified username (DOMAIN\USER) exceeds 22 characters.  Here is a link to my post regarding this bug.  I hope this helps you as it took months of testing on our end to figure it out.

Levin Conway

[EthanGomberg]

Did they also have problems bringing in data separately into ArcMap or only when they loaded in their old MXDs? Thank you.

[AlexRodriguez]

Not sure to whom this question is being asked, but

In our case the MXD would never open.  I'm talking about an MXD that was used with ArcGIS v10.3 trying to be opened by ArcGIS 10.4.

Using the machine with 10.3 installed..we had no problems opening up the app, adding data from the 10.4 server.  The 10.3 software can read the 10.4 data.  We could have created new MXDs in this configuration.  But that wasn't the problem.

The problem was that this machine was working fine with 10.3 installed and reading MXD's created in 10.3

Installed 10.4 and now it can't read the same MXD's.  Upon opening the app would crash.

[RichardDaniels]

We are having a similar issue, in our case we have ArcGIS Desktop 10.3.1 on Windows 7 then we upgraded the Operating System to Windows 10. After that, many MXD's would not open and when double clicked ArcMap would crash on startup.

Perhaps the Windows 10  upgrade hosed the SQL Native Client? Has repairing the SQL Native Client fixed this for anyone?

[AlexRodriguez]

Not for me. We had to use a machine with 10.3 installed to update the data

path from old server to new. Now those updated MXDs work fine in 10.4