Several times now, I’ve set my search paths to something actually useful from the ones that SWx blindly decided to adopt.
Yet, they don’t seem to stick on restart.
Yes, I’ve done the admin approval thing, yet I’m back to weirdness. Who would think that C:/Users would be a good place to look for SolidWorks files, but yet there it is. My favorite is this one stuck in the first entry: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\. Whisky Tango Foxtrot?
Thats typicaly for searching files. File explorer crawl is too slow unless you don’t have many files to search through. Since Windows has been indexing files in the last few versions, SolidWorks is just tapping into the index to get results faster.
I honestly don’t bother with the search paths as I store my files in the same place and don’t reallyneed the search.
In that case I don’t think the built in search inside will work without indexing. Yo are left doing Windows search that do the slow ceawl through the files.
There are server options to indexing shared folders so that index searching works. Someone on the server has to set it up.
This issue has been under investigating for some time now, but kept low profile to other users.
-Indexing settings of the operating system creates changes in the file location settings of SolidWorks.
So if there is only and has only been 1 version of SolidWorks installed, this is no problem.
But with multiple versions of SolidWorks installed, it becomes messy.
And if there are multiple updates done one a workstation, eg SolidWorks 2019, 2023, 2025, it gets chaos. Looking in the registry files that are made for SolidWorks, there is also chaos in the references.
This is the common way to handle things in Software development. Only test is with fresh installs, no testing in the way it is actually used in the market. Create a new part of code, put it in the old code, block some lines of the old code, an ready.
This issue has been brought under attention of multiple VARs, and they are not willing to handle it as a bug. Workaround is a fresh install on a clean workstation. To test a new version of SolidWorks, you just put another new workstation next to the old one.
