first, this is more of a tech support FYI than it is a forum "discussion", but searching through the website, i couldn't find anyplace else to submit this.  besides, if a user is having the same problem that i did, this may help to isolate the problem with a temporary work-around/solution until solidworks fixes their 1980's era install.

we have another program on our computers that uses xceedzip.dll.  when i  installed solidworks, the install clobbered the dll from the other program, which  resulted in us not being able to run this other program until we did a  complete re-install of it.  upon further investigation, we found that the version of xceed from solidworks is *much* older than the one used by the other program that we use.

my suggestion to the solidworks programming dept is to either keep your software support tools updated when you release your software, or at the very least, check the versions of any duplicate software on a client's computer and do a version check deferring to the newer version.  this is a real pain to have to go to each computer that has both of these programs and do a re-install of the original program after installing solidworks.

my suggestion to users is to be prepared to do a re-install of any of your existing software that might be affected by a solidworks install.  fortunately for me i had to only reinstall one program (so far..... ).

************* UPDATE ***********

i actually have found a much easier workaround, but as of the last solidworks update, this seems moot.  simply keeping a backup of the newer xceedzip.dll and restoring this file fixes the problem.  i created a batch file that automates this.  however, after my last solidworks update, i did not seem to experience this problem.  i guess the question now is, did solidworks actually fix/update their install, or did the last solidworks update not even mess with the xceedzip file because the update only needed to alter certain other solidworks files?