Not just a little broken either. Really, hopelessly mindboggling-ly, epic failure-ly, hurr-durr-derp-derp broken.

Every part I have ever made has had appearance issues. With simple parts, errors are less common, but as the number of bodies in a part or parts in an assembly increases, the chances of a random face taking on a random color approach 100%.

Right now I have a complicated part open in 2010 SP 4.0. It contains several bodies. First, I select "remove all part appearances." This appears to work. Then, I assign a color to each body. Then I save, then close Solidworks. Then I open my part again in Solidworks. Each body retains the color I assigned to it, but now each has faces that are assigned different colors. I never assigned any color to any face, but now there are 30+ faces that have colors assigned to them. Whee!

Solidworks 09, which I frequently work with, is also problematic . I open a large assembly, then play "find the face assigned a random color" and clean it up.

I recall having similar frustrations in 08, 06, and 05. What is taking so long? How can your appearance engine possibly be so dumb? Is it possible that NO effort has been put into this blatant and obvious defect since 2005?