Imagine a scenario where you are solving a linear static study, but your it is taking longer than usual.  A lot longer.

(I have a case like this right now: I'm used to studies with 28-29 million degrees of freedom solving in about 24 hours on my company's hardware, but I ran a 23M DOF study over the weekend and it's still pretty early in it's solve after 72+ hours of run time)

SLDWORKS.exe and star.exe aren't frozen (Task Manager shows neither as 'not responding'), but if you check your Solver Parameter screen, the "current number of performed iterations" hasn't increased in a long time.

The obvious answer is either (a) let it ride and see what happens or (b) cancel the solve, simplify the study, and try again.  Those are your options.  But is there really any other option for how to handle the situation?  I'm inclined to say that there are some things you could try through Task Manager (tinkering with app priority levels or which apps have access to which cores), but I don't think any of those things are advisable.  Certainly not advisable to your average engineer.  And that's even if you could make an impact doing that, which I doubt.