Strange document BUG

[Jim Sculley]

I've come across a particularly nasty BUG which seems to have been
addressed somewhere after SP7, but I'll describe it here since it
doesn't appear in the Maintenance Release Notes.

Symptoms:
--------
The GUI appears to be half-dead.

By half-dead I mean that some operations work just fine. For example, I
can still select faces, and open components by clicking on them. The
feature tree is alive, some hotkeys work, etc. However, other aspects
of the
user interface are not functioning. For example, here's a list of what
I can do on a few of the menus when an assembly is opened. All other
items are greyed-out:

File
+---Open
+---Page Setup

View
+---Toolbars
+---Status Bar

View...Display
+---HLR edges in shaded mode
+---Use component color in HLR/HLG mode

View...Modify
+---Rotate about screen center

View...Feature Manager Tree
+---By Features
+---By Dependencies

I cannot zoom, autoscale, rotate, etc. I can pick faces, but I cannot
make a sketch on those faces. I cannot save or close the document, or
even
exit solidworks. Resolving all parts has no effect.

If I hit the ESC key, I get a lovely cryptic message box stating:

"The current operation cannot be interrupted or the document is not
accessible at this time"

The Task Manager shows 'sldworks.exe' consuming zero CPU so it doesn't
seem to be doing anything.

Cure:
-----
Install something later than SP7. I've only tried SP10, so I cannot
comment on 8 or 9.

Cause:
-----

Some steps may or may not be relevant (I don't have time to investigate
all the permutations), but to recreate the problem on a SP7 (and maybe
SP8 and SP9) installation try the following:

A. Create a new part consisting of a block with a tapped hole, created
with the HoleWizard. Make sure the tapped hole uses a Cosmetic Thread.
Save the part.

B. Create a new assembly.

C. Insert the part from step A into the assembly.

D. Save the assembly.

E. Close the part and the assembly

F. Open the assembly.

G. Right click the part and open it.

H. Expand the tapped hole in the feature tree so that you can see the
Cosmetic Thread attribute.

I. Right click the Cosmetic Thread in the feature tree and select 'Edit
Definition'

J. When the cosmetic thread dialog pops up, click OK to close it
(without making any changes).

K. Save the part.

L. Close the part.

You should get the usual 'Components in the assembly have been
modified. Would you like to update the assembly' message box (This in
and of itself could be considered a bug since nothing has actually
changed).

Click OK to go ahead and update. On my SP7 machine, a message box then
pops up complaining that one of the components in the assembly is in a
rollback state and the document is inaccessible at this time. From that
point forward, the GUI is half-dead as described above. I am frankly
surprised that I haven't come across this before, and I'm even more
surprised that someone else hasn't either. Since the maintenance
release notes say nothing about it, I'm assuming that SW located it
internally, and fixed it. Either that or changes made elsewhere after
SP7 fixed it, but that's a scenario I'd rather not think about. A
little too Cadkey-ish.

Jim S.