Solidworks hangs seems to kill Win Explorer

SF 2010-08-05

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 System		System Model
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 (build 2600)		Dell Inc. Precision WorkStation 690
Processor ^a		Main 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
Drives		Memory 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,

Solidworks Administration