Hello everyone,

I have a few problems that have been going on lately. Here you go:

1. When I start SolidWorks, 90% of the time instead of seeing the grey background with the SolidWorks logo on it, I see straight through to my desktop, with only the SolidWorks menu bars top and right (the newsfeed, etc) displaying around it. Any windows I open will stay there as ghosts when closed, moved, etc.

2. Sometimes I will be working in a document and the menu bars will suddenly turn black, re-appearing when I hover my mouse over them, but still black surrounding. Any area that does not have a button on the menu bar remains black indefinitely.

3. Sometimes when I go to edit the appearance of a part, the same black issue occurs with the entire lefthand editing window, so I have no idea where the Okay and Exit buttons are when I edit the apperance, and the preview icons on the right side for showing the appearances are not there.

SolidWorks 2009 Professional SP4.1

Dell Precision M6300

Windows XP Pro SP3 (32-bit)

4 GB Ram

A few details to note:

1. No, I am not working on files that are on a server. They are on my hard drive.

2. I upgraded from SW 2008 instead of a clean install of 2009 with the very first release of 2009.

3. The only applications running alongside are Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook 2003, Symantec Endpoint Protection (I hate it too), and eBoostr.

4. I do not have complete administrative privileges, we run Microsoft Exchange Server here, and since we all share Symantec, our remote IT department has privileges for that reason.

5. Virtual memory and paging file allocations are huge, therefore not the issue.

6. Yes, the 3GB switch is enabled.

7. HELP!