TL,DR: Anyone having seemingly random lockup of PC due to some activity in SW that acts like explorer.exe process is blocked and only recovery is to ctrl-alt-delete and restart machine?
Long story:
Since updating to SW 2023 last fall various users, including myself, have had occasional problem with PC “locking up”. Kind of. SW is completely non responsive. Task bar, Windows button, system tray, all 100% non responsive. One three-fingered salute will get the normal screen to change password, lock, open task manager, etc. Task manager will open it’s Form, but it doesn’t load any of the controls before going non responsive, even says “Not Responding” in the form title. I’ve worked with IT a little and they’ve tried to VNC into the machines to a new session to get some process info, but that was all dead ends. I need try it again to see exact details. I’m tempted to ask if we can enable some more remoting services on a couple of work stations, but it may be weeks or months before it happens on any given machine again. No machine or user seems extra vulnerable or out of reach. Cannot determine a trend or common activity that triggers this other than it’s some activity in SW. It could be save, but it seems like other actions have triggered it. Our task host machine just did it again, there’s no user on that machine, only VNC access most of the time. Yes, the VNC service is still working and allowing connections.
I cannot confirm it is due to 2023, we did not see this at all when we were on 2019. It could have been some windows update around the same time that made the change. I don’t think we have seen this on windows 11 machine, but all of our regular CAD users are on 10 so there’s sample bias there.
So I’m just casting a net incase this sounds similar to anything other users have seen.
Sounds similar, I’ll look for preview pane open. I keep that closed nearly all the time, I’ve been convinced it causes problems in the past. Might be why some users have this happen more than others.
I think all the users have the view mode set to details, PDM is nearly useless in icon mode.
I had to set my Folder Options under the General tab to un-check everything under the Privacy group. For some reason, recently used files that are in PDM and show up in this list causes explorer to really slow down or break.
I don’t know that SW2023 was better or worse than SW2024 but I do know that Windows File Explorer would lock up quite regularly on my machine but my boss would very rarely have his lock up. Usually I could resume work by bringing up task manager and under the details tab I could find the offending Explorer.exe & kill it & everything would be ok again. I don’t know that I ever had Windows not respond at all.
I have this issue and many of my coworkers have it but less frequently it seems. It was a lot more evident when on Windows 10 as Windows Explorer would freeze. Now that we’re on Windows 11, it doesn’t freeze, but restarting the explorer.exe process generally resolves the ‘lockdown’
I finally managed to recreate the problem on my workstation. Started in Solidworks, I edited a dimension and pressed enter, then the Solidstroke started. I’m actually happy about this as it’s giving me opportunity to do some investigation, kind of.
Windows + R does nothing.
Ctrl+Alt_Delete does work, Task Manager will open a window but becomes non-responsive before loading any of the controls on the form. It’s blank and never comes to life.
Any open windows other than SW (and now Task Manager) are responding. Outlook works. Some windows are covered by the large Solidworks window which is non-responsive.
All of the system tray, Windows button, etc non responsive.
I had Seach Everythign open and was able to launch a couple of PowerShells from that. Two are unresponsive on the TASKLIST /V command.
Ctrl + C does not cancel the command.
One PowerShell was able to TaskKill /f /im explorer.exe, took it several minutes to return from that call, now desktop and system tray gone, as expected. Then I tried TaskKill /f /im sdlworks.exe, that returned error in a few seconds: “This operation returned because the timeout period expired.”
If I click on the Solidworks window I get a dialog. Title “Microsoft Windows” and message “The application is not responding. The program may respond again if you wait. Do you want to end this process?” Buttons: “End Process” and “Cancel” buttons have the same effect; nothing.
Trying to launch Task Manager then clicking on the blank form provides the same dialog, but on that one will actually end the process and the blank Task Manager window closes.
I have Event Viewer open but I’m not seeing anythign interresting on that. But I don’t know what I’m looking for either.
Now my Search Everythign window is locked up (I made the mistake of trying to open a folder locaiton)
My last PowerShell window is running State explorer.exe and will not return. Ctrl+C has no effect.
I’m open to any ideas for trouble shooting.
Any other ways to cancel a command in PowerShell?
Any way to open cmd.exe or powershell.exe? Windows+R does nothing.
Our task host machine (PDM) had this happen a couple of days ago. That is kind of big for trouble shooting as there’s no user on that computer, it’s all API. There was no VNC connection at the time of the SolidStroke and there was no mouse or keyboard attached, display was turned off.
I cannot find any event logged that correlates with when it starts, so I don’t know how to determine if there was a task executing at the time or if the task host was idle.
We are bumping our limit of licenses sometimes, either SW or PDM, and I was starting to wonder if we’re getting caught in some license failure lock. But this one would have been between 1630 and 0600 the next morning, very low license usage during that time.