SOLIDWORKS is not responding – but has it really crashed?

Have you been receiving the SOLIDWORKS not responding Windows message: ‘sldworks.exe is not responding‘, more often since switching to Windows 7 or Windows 10? This may actually be a result of changes to the Windows messaging system and not an issue with SOLIDWORKS.

sldworks.exe is not responding

Way back in the ancient OS of Windows XP, the “not responding” message would appear after a program didn’t change for 30 seconds.  Then Windows Vista emerges and changes the game by reducing this time to 10 seconds.  But they didn’t stop there!  In Windows 7, if a program doesn’t respond in 3 seconds, this message pops up just to scare you.

Should I Close the program?

If you assume SOLIDWORKS is frozen and choose “Close the program”, you just ‘killed’ your session of SOLIDWORKS. But in reality, SOLIDWORKS was probably still chugging away as it rebuilt your complex model.  Having that extra patience and selecting “Wait for the program to respond” may just save you the headache of lost work.