Dynamo 3.6 crashes during basic UI operations (pan/zoom/node editing)

Revit
1

Hi!

We’ve been experiencing persistent crashes in Dynamo 3.6 when running inside Revit 2026.4, and after extensive troubleshooting I believe I’ve identified the root cause — though I’m not entirely sure and haven’t found a solution yet :frowning:

Those crashes occur randomly during basic canvas operations like panning, zooming, placing new nodes, or deleting existing ones. More importantly, they seem to have nothing to do with script execution — Dynamo freezes and crashes even when I’m just navigating around a graph or making simple edits. When that happens, Dynamo freezes first, then both Dynamo and Revit close without showing any error dialog.

This has been happening for a while now across multiple machines at our office, and I’ve just set up a brand new high-end workstation (Intel i9-14900KF, 128GB RAM, NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti where the same issue persists. So this shouldn’t be a hardware limitation problem.

After digging through the Dynamo logs, I noticed something that appears in every single session:

WPF Render Mode: SoftwareOnly

This means Dynamo is rendering its UI using the CPU instead of the GPU, despite hardware acceleration being fully enabled in Revit’s graphics settings. Software rendering is much slower and appears to be causing instability during canvas operations — which explains why simple actions like panning and zooming trigger crashes.

The logs don’t capture any actual error when the crash happens. The log file just stops abruptly after normal operations like saving the file, with no exception or error message recorded.

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to isolate the cause by systematically disabling add-ins and packages.

First, I disabled Xrev Transmit, thinking its ASP.NET Core dependencies might be causing a conflict since the log showed a warning about System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager version mismatches. The crashes continued.

Next, I disabled pyRevit since it loads many assemblies at startup. Same result — still crashing, still showing SoftwareOnly rendering.

I then removed our internal DynaBIMToolbox package entirely, since it was mentioned in the dependency conflict warning. The warning disappeared, but the crashes continued and WPF was still stuck in SoftwareOnly mode.

In the meantime I tried disabling some of our in house plugins, trying to figure out if there was a conflict, caused by any of them, but still with no result.

Throughout all of this, I verified that hardware acceleration is enabled in Revit’s Options under Graphics, and checked that my GPU drivers are current (NVIDIA driver version 32.0.15.9144 from December 2025). Nothing made any difference.

I have a typical set of community packages installed including archi-lab.net, bimorphNodes, Clockwork, Data-Shapes, spring nodes, and others. Some of these show warnings about being built for older Dynamo versions, but they load and function correctly — the crashes happen even during sessions where I’m not using any nodes from these packages.

I’m trying to figure out why Dynamo is forcing WPF into SoftwareOnly rendering mode when all the hardware acceleration settings are correctly enabled.

If anyone else is experiencing similar crashes during basic UI operations in Revit 2026, I’d love to hear about it. And if the Dynamo development team has any insight into what might cause WPF to fall back to software rendering in this environment, that would be incredibly helpful.

I’ve attached numerous log files from the past few days’ sessions that demonstrate the issue: SwissTransfer - Send large files securely and free of charge

You can see the SoftwareOnly render mode appearing consistently, followed by normal operations, and then the log simply ending when the crash occurs.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

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Revit 2026 Closes and Dynamo Crashes When Moving Around My Dynamo Script Workspace
Dynamo Constantly Stalling
2

A bit of an off topic, but why is it no longer possible to hold on to a wire in Dynamo while panning :smiley: is that by design, as it’s extremely inconvenient

3

As far as I know, Dynamo has never used the GPU. This was by design early on - the toolset was accessible and usable on more systems this way. Every Dynamo for Revit log I have also has this line so I’m guessing this is unrelated.

Based on what you’re describing I’m leaning more towards conflict in access of some sort - backups conflicting with onedrive were trigging issues like crazy for me in a recent workshop.

A few questions:

  1. Do you have any type of cloud mirroring at play? This includes OneDrive which is forcing a backup of everyone’s everything since Windows 11. If so, try disabling that while working and see if there is any performance increase. If that fixes it we can confirm it’s a onedrive thing and take actions accordingly.
  2. If you disable infosec policies for a bit does that fix the issue? This would confirm it’s an infosec thing and you can review/whitelist accordingly.
4

Known issue which was resolved in a future build. Unclear when the Revit team will incorporate into 2026.

2 Likes
5

I see, as I rarely dig into logs and I’m not so familiar, so I thought this might be an issue. As for your suggestions, I would need to do some digging. I will check, but I don’t think we have cloud mirroring and we don’t use OneDrive for sure. As for infosec policies, could you guide me on how / where to check and disable those if any?

6

Double check this even if it seems you aren’t; the default is ‘on’ and your IT team would have to jump though a LOT of hoops to make it go away for good. This isn’t for the primary file but for the backups and local copies which are synched by default. If it’s forced off globally, you’ve got a good IT team, the type of team who you’ll have to work closely with to resolve any infosec policy issues.

Sadly the Dynamo logs aren’t going to tell us much of anything useful for this kind of crash. If it’s also bringing down Revit that might have a clue in the journal, but those haven’t been collcted here.

7

Thx, Jacob! The issue is we definitely don’t have a “good IT team“, it’s basically a single sysAdmin that’s extremely difficult to communicate with (which is more or less the standard though :smiley: ). But anyway, I’ll do my best to dig around. More importantly, I’ll evaluate the effort necessary to resolve that, as we have already been working for a while on translating all our Dynamo graphs into proper plugins, precisely due to numerous dependency and scalability issues, so It might make more sense to prioritize that. In case I am somehow able to find the reason for this behavior, I will let you know.

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8

If Revit and Dynamo are crashing it is worth reviewing a journal (or three) from a crashed session as that may have the root cause captured.

9

Here are some of yesterday’s journals: SwissTransfer - Send large files securely and free of charge

I think it was only two of them that represent a clean exit, so I hope the rest should be able to give us a good clue

10

Appears to be either a WPF issue. This is possibly caused by an add-in conflict as PyRevit is in every journal attempting to use Revit API for 2025, and several other conflicts which are more recent and less alarming. Disabling every customization and trying again is easy and rules that out quickly.

More likely it’s due to the method of trigger or other instability issue. Do you have custom UI’s in the graph?

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11

It is not a single graph, as it has been observed on multiple ones, but yes, it is highly likely that all of them are using Data-Shapes’ custom UI. However, the very first thing I tried was disabling pyRevit, which did not solve anything.

Again, I have never tried to evaluate Journal files for such potential crash before, so this would be only a suggestion, but it seems to me that every crash happens during Dynamo’s context menu operations and in particular ‘ContextMenuPopup‘

Journal Last Action Before Crash
0035 WpfPopup(ContextMenuPopup).WpfParentMenuItem(0,Align).Click()
0037 WpfPopup(ContextMenuPopup).WpfTextBox(0,SearchTextBox).ChangeText(linkele)
0038 WpfPopup(ContextMenuPopup).WpfParentMenuItem(0,Align).Click()
0039 WpfPopup(ContextMenuPopup).WpfParentMenuItem(0,Align).Click()

while clean exits do not :slight_smile:

12

I get that previously disabling other add-ins didn’t seem to fix it, but any one of those add-ins could be putting stuff into play which will increase stability issues, so manually cleaning things up is a must.

That line is likely Datashapes being triggered by Dynamo though I’d have to ‘live read’ the journal to confirm, which is more than I have time for today (nor do I have a graph and model to test with). You can test it this way:

  1. Start Revit, open a project
  2. Go to your journals folder and find the most recent journal.xx.txt
  3. Open that journal in something like notepad++ and scroll to the end
  4. Open Dynamo
  5. refresh the journal - new lines should appear
  6. open your graph
  7. refresh the journal
  8. run the graph
  9. refresh the journal
  10. repeat running the graph (step 8) and refreshing the journal (step 9) until you’ve got a good handle on what each line does

After confirming you can try removing datashapes temporarily and see if that clears it up. If so the next step would be to try updating DataShapes to the newest build and see if that makes it more stable. This may take some effort to clear up. The previous version of Datashapes was based on the IronPython2 engine which hasn’t been supported in ~4 years now, so security issues (not addressed here but needs to be noted) and instability should be expected. It’s something of a small miracle it’s been this stable for this long.

13

Hey,

Just to note, we are facing similar issues. We also still use Data-shapes as a package and we will let you know if removing the package solves anything for us.

**edit: it does not solve our issue..

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14

Thanks for letting me know! Which version of data-shapes are you using? For this particular Dynamo / Revit version, we are using 2025.3.120 and there is only one newer version, that was released I think less than a month ago. It seemed to work fine on Dynamo for Revit 2025, which is using the same .NET version, also with the same pyRevit version installed

15

Even with no extra packages installed… just what comes natively… dynamo crashes

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16

We work in Revit 2026.4
dynamo versions

image

In Revit 2026.2 no issues were occuring

1 Like
17

yeah same here, and which Data - Shapes version?

18

ok, now that one’s helpful :smiley: at least you saved me from removing each package one by one until I come to this realization myself

19

A question,
are there any unresolved/missing packages in your graphs?

20

I am experiencing ALL of these same symptoms that you are……crashing during basic UI operation. Graph in “manual mode” and crashing. Crashing when disconnecting wires. Crashing when placing out of the box nodes on canvas.

Civil3D 26.2

Dynamo Core 3.6.1

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