Notes are not up to scale.

So your mechanical leader and notes are behaving badly and not scaling to the viewport scale. Bad notes, bad... You either need the notes whisperer or set a couple of variables to neuter these issues. AMSYMSCALE sets symbols (ie Notes) back on track and AMRESCALE gets your existing notes to behave. Whew.. good notes, good.

Isn't that special.

Or should I say "that isn't special". The special characters in the dimensioning mode show incorrectly. The diameter symbol for instance looks like some weird text. Well this is a Window Font issue. Look for the AMGDT*.ttf fonts in the Windows\Font folder. If they are not there, copy them from a working computer or do a repair install of AutoCAD Mechanical and you should get them back. Congratulations, you are special again.

Your contours aren't showing

What happens when you can not enclose your figure. When using the contour command (whether it be outside or inside), the contour only appears as broken lines. What's up with that? A little research and I find that if any part of the contour is an ellipse, you are hosed. A little editing magic and tada, you are full figured uhmmm contoured again.

I need details!

Ok, so you forgot the details. No, I am not talking about your anniversary. The details in Mechanical disappeared again. But wait you say, did we not fix this. Well almost, I found that detailing blocks not on layer 0 or AM_0 kept the Detail command from showing all. Move blocks to an non offending layer and the details of life become clear again. Whew, close one.

It's all in the details...

But my details are not detailed enough. A user was using the Detail command and the detail showed up with items missing. Nothing we tried worked. I asked a user who had the problem previously and he reminded me of the fix. It was service pack 2 to the rescue. We checked which version the user was running (AMVER at the command line), and when we saw he was still at SP1a, we upgraded to SP2 and tada, the details of his life shown through. WE are back.

I need some dialog ASSISTance...

Oh where oh where have my dialogs gone. A user here was working and his dialog box for the Rename command vanished. He typed in his REN shortcut and it appeared to execute correctly but nothing appeared. I tried a variety of things but nothing worked. I did a search on the Autodesk forum and I found a message that said to type in the ASSIST command. When the dialog appears, cancel the command. The missing dialogs should appear. Seemed strange, but we gave it a try and ... they were back. Hmmmm. Are you listening Autodesk. Bug. Thanks for listening.

Z is for Zorr... Zero

How to be level headed. I do not know how it happens (I have a few guesses), but we get entities with non zero Z components in our drawings quite a bit. These wreak havoc when creating 2D drawings because lines begin to have strange measurements and objects will not edit correctly. It is much harder after the fact to try and correct this but there are some methods. Use of AutoCAD's own FLATTEN command is a good place to start. It works pretty good but we have found it doesn't fix everything usually. Entities inside blocks and objects like splines will not flatten. You will have to edit them individually to flatten them. One thing we have done is that since we use quite a few converted 3D drafting files (from Unigraphics), we flatten them before they come into our assemblies. Flattening them before we start using them to snap to is a big help. We try, I repeat try to, not to use the converted 3D ents to draw to but it is a mixed bag. In Mechanical, the Hide function has issues with entities that are not on the same plane so take note. In the meantime, keep calm and keep a flat, err.. level head.

Ejection Button.

Eject all your unused baggage. A long time ago I wrote a purge routine that would purge all nested items. I am reposting to help you "lighten the load"

(defun pp_PurgeAllReport (/ test tpurgd purgd total)
(command "_.LAYER" "M" "0" "")
(setq tpurgd 0)
(setq purgd 2)
(while (>= purgd 2)
(progn (setq purgd 0)
(cond
(t
(setvar "cmdecho" 0)
(command "_.purge" "_all" "*")
(while (not (zerop (getvar "cmdactive")))
(command "_y")
(setq purgd (1+ purgd))
(setq tpurgd (1+ tpurgd))
)
)
)
(prompt "\nPurging nested items!")
(princ "\n")
(setq tpurgd (1- tpurgd))
)
)
(setq total (cons tpurgd '(items purged)))
(princ total)
(princ)
)