Solidworks hangs, seems to kill Win Explorer?

I am a contract engineer and during the day I work on-site at a company using a Dell Precision 690. It is not a great machine but it is not a total slacker either. I am under the gun on a really tight project and I cannot afford this kind of mysterious issue.

So, Solidworks 2010 SP3.1 frequently seems to hang when I am opening an assembly. The assemblies I am working with are growing in size as they develop but  are not very large yet (11-12MB). As they grow the problem seems to happen more  often. It is not one certain file but only seems to happen when I have other SW files open already. When it happens all the icons on my Win XP desktop disappear (which indicates Win Explorer crashed). Any iconified app I open shows up but when I try to close it it persists on the screen. If I move the task manager around on the screen it leaves a trail of it's image across the desktop. These last two items tell me the OS is having issues but the resouces being used are very low. I tried to kill some of the processes that were not system critical and the machine is just not coming back. I have to shutdown and restart (hard shutdown, reset will not respond).

Also, with this machine I have to shutdown and restart several times a day to prevent even more of these problems. It seems like the longer I have SolidWorks open the more likely it will hang up.

When I check task manager the performance of the processor is low at 3-6%. The memory usage is not unusual and I have free memory available. If I look at the processes, SolidWorks.exe is not using a large amount of resources (say 200-300MB of memory) but it isn't changing, just stuck at one number. This indicates to me that SolidWorks is somehow stuck, but I don;t know why.

This problem has been persistant and the IT department actually rebuilt the machine and did a complete fresh install of the OS about 2 months ago. Now our IT folks have washed their hands of it and will not respond to any new tickets but management will not replace the machine either. I am going to send this to the VAR as well but my past experience is not so good there either.

Operating  SystemSystem  Model
Windows XP Professional  Service Pack 3 (build 2600)
Dell Inc. Precision  WorkStation 690
Processor  aMain Circuit Board  b
3.20 gigahertz Intel  Xeon
16 kilobyte primary memory cache
2048 kilobyte secondary memory  cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Hyper-threaded (4  total)
Board: Dell Inc. 0DT029  A00
Bus Clock: 1066 megahertz

DrivesMemory Modules  c,d
249.93 Gigabytes  Usable Hard Drive Capacity
194.10 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
ASUS  DRW-1814BL [CD-ROM drive]
SONY CD-RW CRX217E [CD-ROM drive]
ATA ST3250820AS SCSI Disk Device (250.00  GB) -- drive 0, Status: Healthy

3326 Megabytes Usable  Installed Memory
Slot 'DIMM 1 ' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DIMM 2 ' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DIMM 3  ' has 1024 MB
Slot 'DIMM 4 ' has 1024 MB

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Anyone have an idea of what may be happening?

Thanks,

DP

SolidworksAdministration