Autodesk Fusion 360 “The Browser Exits Unexpectedly Error in Fusion 360”

I use Autodesk Fusion 360 software for general 3D modeling work such as 3D printing, welding and other fabrication. I was trying to use Fusion 360 to design some new welding projects, primarily a new welding cart and another secret that I’ll reveal later :). However I couldn’t get the software to work today. It kept telling me the following errors:

Error Dialog: “The browser process exits unexpectedly error in Fusion 360”

Job Status was displaying: “You are not connected to the Internet.”

Obviously I was for sure connected to the internet without any proxy or VPN settings. The software was working recently without issue, just 24 hours ago. Initially I thought maybe the services were down on Autodesk’s side, since it’s a cloud product. However their website indicated everything was fully functional and good to go. I tried a ton of stuff including:

• White listing the app in windows firewall.
• Running the software as Administrator.
• Disabling windows firewall.
• Disabling anti-virus software.
• Re-installing Fusion 360.
• Rebooting the computer.

Nothing was working and I even made a post on their support forum, which I’ve now updated to help others. I decided to grab a diagnostics dump from their software, it’s in the Help menu. The logs showed that Fusion 360 was having a hard time working with the C:\Users\myusernamehere\AppData\Local\Temp directory.  I’m primarily a Linux guy, but I’m aware Windows has some quirky security features going on these days. I decided to try doing a disk cleanup to see if it fixes my issue, and it worked! Here is what I did:

1. I closed Fusion 360.
2. Then I right clicked on the C:\ drive in File Explorer and selected Properties
3. In the Properties window I clicked the “Disk Cleanup” button.
4. While in the Disk Cleanup dialog I just scrolled to the bottom and selected “Temporary files”.
5. After clicking the “OK” button I waited for Windows to clean itself up.

After the process was completed I re-launched Fusion 360 and it worked fine and was able to connect!

Why? I’m not sure. I’ll leave that for the Fusion 360 devs to figure out.