LookupTables and RMEP

We came across an interesting situation with Revit MEP yesterday. For no apparent reason, the pipe elbows on all of the 32-bit machines quit working. No matter what size pipes were used, the elbows wouldn't change size. The families weren't custom families, and there wasn't anything apparent that could have been causing the error.

After much discussion, choice language, and failed attempts to fix the problem between the offices, Jason came up with an idea. Remembering a that the Revit.ini file was overwritten when 2010 was installed, he recalled some problems that were tied to the LookupTable. Apparently, all the 32-bit machines had Revit MEP installed over the network, while the 64-bit machines had Revit installed from the disk. The result of this was that the 64-bit machines had the LookupTable installed on the C-drive, while the 32-bit machines had the LookupTable pathed to their office engineering drive. When the server puked out a few weeks ago, the 32-bit machines all lost the LookupTable. Once we realized this, we took a copy of the LookupTable and placed it in the MME Revit Content Library and fixed the .ini file to path to the server for the LookupTable. All was fixed.

What's important here is that when a new machine has Revit MEP installed, the .ini file needs to be modified. Why the pathing of the LookupTable wasn't made more transparent by Autodesk, we'll never know. But it's very important that all machines be pathed to the same place, so that one person's machine doesn't modify the LookupTable and end up doing things differently than others. More info here , here, and here