Hello folks,

I'm new to SW, tho I've used other software for decades. I'm making an assembly of a small machine with about 355 components. Most of the mates are resolved at the sub-assembly level and I have no performace issues. But two days ago something strange happened that threw me for a spin.

I was dragging a part to another location not far from its origin and then I lost the entire thing. Everything dissapeared from the screen. The Features Manager went blank, much like starting a new model.

I didn't want to give up on it, tho I should have closed the session without saving, but I had too many unsaved changes for me to do that. So, I spent some hours looking for the parts. Somehow I got the Features Manager to show data. When I clicked on the planes, I discovered they went to infinity, I mean infinity! So I figured that somehow the workspace had been resized and started looking for my machine in outer space.

I figured the best way would be to try to resize the planes. Some planes resized ok but one did not. So I thought to look at the extreme edges of the plane and I found a speck half the size of a pixel. I zoomed on it and there was the machine!

But I still could not resize the plane so I looked at the opposite extremes and saw another speck. It was the part I was dragging initially. So, I dragged it close to the machine and was able to resize the plane. Well, all in all, everything is back except I lost the appearance features.

At the part and componenet level the parts have an appearance applied and they are ok, but at the assembly level they are plain with default colors. Here are my questions:

1. What could have caused me to lose the part I was dragging?
2. What could have caused the workspace to resize to infinity?
3. How do I get the appearance back?

I'm using SW2010 Sp4 on Win XP Pro 32 bit btw. Any help will be greatly appreciated since I've been dealing with this for 3 days now.