Problems with line settings

I have been using Autocad for surveying and civil work over the last 5 years. I realized there are things that I forgot over the years. This week I bought a new PC and installed 2013. So far everything is great until I try to start a line. I pick my point; I type the distance then the bearing but the line continues to snap back to what appears to be coordinated 0,0. Can anyone offer a solution? At the moment, I am dead in the water with work, and I've searched around but I've failed to find a solution online.

Are you typing @dist

If you have snap on and the area of the screen displayed is huge it will snap back to 0,0 type LIMITS set 0,0 and the rough size of the survey area then Zoom All. Once you draw some lines you can zoom E.

Ah, it worked. I don't know how I did it, maybe it was a setting I stumbled upon using my older program, but I could type L [enter] distance [

A better way is to use a lisp you can ignore the d ' " for bearings then just enter dist then 123.4456 123 deg 44 mins 56 sec line appears.

; here is bearing entry
 (setq ang_ans (getstring "\nEnter bearing angle in Deg.MMSS :"))
 (setq ans_len (strlen ang_ans))

 (setq x 0)
 (while (/= char_found ".")
   (setq x (+ x 1))
   (setq ans_deg (strcat ans_deg char_found))
   (setq char_found (substr ang_ans x 1))
   (if (= x 9)(setq char_found "."))
  )
  (setq x (+ x 1))
  (setq ans_min (substr ang_ans x 2))
  (setq x (+ x 2))
  (setq ans_secs (substr ang_ans x 2))
      
   (if (= ans_min "")(setq ans_min "0"))
   (if (= ans_secs "")(setq ans_secs "0"))