SUMMARY As for crashing a lot of this is related to Windows and the
prerequiste products and/or Graphics Drivers. About 7 out of 10 cases
(and I can get data to back this up from our case logs) are related to
either Visual C++ Redist issues, .NET Framework issues and non-
certified graphics cards/drivers. As hard as it is to believe, we see
improper graphics drivers cause everything from crashing to prevent a
user to save .dwg files to Solidworks not opening.
TESTS You can test the crashing theory for drivers by running [software] OpenGL (at a
performance hit) and see if you continue to crash. If you do, take a
look at the event logs and see if .NET is throwing errors. We see a
lot of corruption with .NET; you can either do a repair or
uninstall .NET 3.0 and install .NET 3.5 from Microsoft (which
contains .NET 3.0).
OTHER Another common issue is corrupt user settings (HKEY_Current_User
\Software\Solidworks). This branch commonly gets corrupted by Anti-
Spyware/Anti-Virus applications. Such applications as SpyBot and it's
System TeaTimer are ones that have caused problems. Also things such
as Norton System Cleanup has caused problems as well. These are just
some of the ones that we have run into.
