I'm sorry, but i just need to vent after a nightmare of a week with using routing. I have been using routing for a year now and i find it a good tool for drawing hydraulic pipes and hoses on baler machines that we manufacture.  I also do conduit routings on the balers.  I have no problem making a route.  The routing I do is started after I get a complete main assembly of a baler completed. One of the major components in my assembly is the power unit.  Our power unit is modeled in Autodesk Inventor by the vendor and sent to us as a .stp file.  We then take that imported file and place it in our main assembly.  Many times after putting an imported model in our assembly and routing to it will cause the file to crash everytime it is opened.  It will open correctly again if all mates are deleted from the imported model.  This is something I face at the end of every project when i am finishing up the file with routing and it happened again this week causing lots of down time.

Another problem I have faced this week is routes disappearing with a message "rebuild error". I created the routes a month ago and have not had a problem with them until yesterday. I know they were on the drawing at 2:30pm yesterday becuse i printed it.  Then i open the file again an hour later and i find some missing routes with "rebuild error" message. When i go to Edit Route, my sketch is fine and still in tact and it shows a preview of the route like its suppose to look. Exit the sketch and it disappears again.

Has anyone out there experenced any of this? I have read other's post about routing being unstable at times. In my opinon, it has been a real headache and I'm starting to wander if it is really worth time and effort to use it anymore because it caused so much down time toward the end of my projects. I am running solidworks 2010 sp 3.0 and I'm aware that there is some kind of fix for rebuild error in pipe routing for sp 4.0 but i don't feel that will fix all the problems it has.