I have noticed on several Acad dwg files from our civil engineer that even though I have turned off all grids and grid snapping that the cursor snaps to these small grid spacings regardless of my settings.
Also his files have a rather distorted appearance along with my cursor having that similar distorted look as well. I can usually get my work done, but have found that "u" doesn't regen the drawing enough to clear up the screen distortion (all the linework looks like wiggle linetype).
TIA,
Jeff
Jeff Budkoski
Director of Architecture
Higginbotham Design & Engineering
DataCAD v12
AutoCAD Architecture 2008
It sounds like your drawings are a long way from absolute zero. This is typical with ACAD files, especially if they come from a civil engineer. You can move them to absolute zero using either absolute cartesian or absolute polar. But you can also set DCAD to move the drawing to absolute zero when you import the file. There is a check box in the import dialog box. Just make sure you check that box when you open or import the DWG file. If that doesn't work it probably means that the drawing has some entities at absolute zero and some scattered miles away. In that case you will just have to move the portion of the drawing that are a long way away back to absolute zero.
To add to Paul's post, sometimes the import option for moving the drawing to absolute zero will cause the import to fail. If it does, try un-checking it and do Paul's manual move.
Thanks! - Josh Do. Or do not. There is no try. Josh's Digital Downloads is come back online soon. Stay tuned. (soon is a relative term)