Other file types turned into FormZ autosave

[McGyver55]

 

 

I could not think of a better way of titling this, but that's essentially the problem...

 

I should probably first mention that this is occurring on my Dell XPS8700 running Windows 7 Pro and although I do not know the exact version of FormZ Free that I had (attempted to delete it) it was whatever was current back in May 2015.

The Problem:

Several months ago I downloaded the free version of FormZ and after trying it out a bit I immediately found hundreds of FormZ icon files spread out randomly throughout my computer... Being that some of the folder it infected were ones that have to sent out to clients this was unacceptable and I immediately stopped using FormZ, suspecting some sort of bug. It does not stop there though... Recently I noticed that when saving a Sculptris file, a FormZ autosave file with the same name will appear in a random place on the computer... And that's not all, just yesterday I found that several files (on a separate computer these same files are referred to in "properties" as "File Type: File") in Poser Pro 2012 had been "converted" to FormZ autosave files...

 

I can not find any mention of this bug or what to do about it, except for two enigmatic statements in CGI threads offsite, that mention (I'm quoting the only one I can still find): "one problem is that it takes over a bunch of image file associations, and there's no quick way to get them back to the way they were before the installation."... Yeah, I'd say that was a problem alright... But without elaboration on that statement I have no idea what exactly was the problem...

I decided to uninstall FormZ, but could not find an uninstaller, so I just deleted the one main FormZ folder I could locate as per suggestions offsite (a Google search did not show any FormZ forum threads that dealt with this topic).

 

I replaced the converted files from the clean computer, but apparently they became FormZ autosave files once they were on the computer that formerly had FormZ installed on it.

 

Does anyone know what is going on here or have any idea how to fix this?

 

I thank you in advance for any help or information you may be able to provide on this topic and greatly appreciate your help and knowledge.

[Tech]

Hi McGyver,

 

It is true that very old versions of formZ (ie v4 and earlier) would offer to associate .JPG files with formZ -- and thus they would attempt to open in formZ rather than your other desired software if you selected that option), but we have not heard of any other such issues.

 

formZ AutoSave files will have a .FZA file extension, so if you have other software that uses that same extension, then it is possible that they could show as formZ Autosave files.  Uninstalling formZ from your Add / Remove Programs control Panel should "restore that" and you can manually configure your file extensions via the Control Panels: Default Programs control panel.

 

Perhaps you are having an issue with a virus -- or your virus detection software?  Make sure to run a scan with current virus definitions, and always disable your virus detection software when installing software for best results.

 

Hope that helps!

[Dheming]

I literally have this exact same problem! About two months ago I downloaded the latest formZ demo, played with it for it a while to compare it with Rhino, then stopped using it. When I started to notice random files being saved as "formZ Layout Autosave" instead of their proper format I promptly uninstalled the demo. Even after doing so this glitch has continued to randomly occur.

Last week I bought KeyShot 6 Pro and today I was playing around with the animation function for the first time. Upon exporting a movie that was supposed to be in uncompressed AVI, the saved file somehow became a 155Mb formZ Layout Autosave file instead and cannot be opened by any of my software.

 

Searching on Google lead me here to this thread and I wanted to add my experience. Obviously this is not an isolated issue. It seems that resetting the Default Programs in Control Panel has allowed me to export the uncompressed AVI movie properly from KS now.