I have been working w/ SW drawings for many years.  As of late, our drawings have been made from assemblies with components which are not native SW:  That is to say they are CATIA models brought into SW via step.  The components come into SW OK and pass the import diagnostic check OK.  The  components assemble easily to form a stable SW assembly file. (large in size however).

The Issue:

Drawings generated with these models are unstable.  They become hard to work with, especially with dimensioning and the addition of blocks.  More times than not, this activity results in a SW error "Not Responding."  If I am able to complete a drawing, the plot / print times rise to unreasonable levels going from a few seconds (processing within the workstation) to 18 mins!!!  We do not see this issue with drawings which largely come from native SW model data.

Does this have anything to do with the fact that these are non-native SW files.  After exhaustive experimentation, this is the only variable that exists between problem drawings and non-problem drawings.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

JS