Troubleshooting

sldProcMon.exe: What SolidWorks' Resource Monitor Actually Does (And Why It Eats CPU)

Open Task Manager during almost any SolidWorks session and you’ll find sldProcMon.exe sitting quietly next to SLDWORKS.exe. Most of the time it’s invisible — a few megabytes of RAM, no window, no icon you’d notice. Then, on some machines, it pins a full CPU core at idle, spawns a fresh copy every time you relaunch SolidWorks without cleaning up the old one, or — in scripted and remote-desktop automation — climbs to 90%+ CPU and refuses to let go. ...

SolidWorks UI Settings That Don't Persist — PropertyManager, Toolbars, and the Registry Fix

Some SolidWorks settings save reliably between sessions. Others reset silently every time you restart, or behave differently depending on how SolidWorks was installed, what Windows profile type is in use, and whether any admin policy overrides your preferences. This post covers the specific settings that fail most often, where they’re stored, and the fixes that work. Where SolidWorks Stores Its Settings SolidWorks stores user settings in two places: the Windows registry and document files. Knowing which is which tells you immediately whether a reset issue is a machine problem or a template problem. ...

SolidWorks 2025 Freezing Your PC? Fix the sldShellExtServer DCOM Error

Your machine doesn’t crash. Nothing shows an error dialog. Windows just stalls — File Explorer hangs for 5 to 30 seconds, the taskbar goes unresponsive, and then everything unfreezes as if nothing happened. This happens repeatedly, and it always seems to coincide with working near SolidWorks files. The culprit is sldShellExtServer.exe, the SolidWorks shell extension server, and it’s been causing more friction in SolidWorks 2025 than previous versions. Here’s how to confirm it’s the source and how to fix it without a support ticket. ...

The 7 Most Common CAD File Format Problems (And How to Fix Them)

Intro You’ve done the design work. The model looks right, the dimensions check out, everything looks clean inside your CAD software. Then you export the file, send it downstream, and something breaks. Maybe the geometry comes out wrong. Maybe the vendor can’t open it. Maybe the bend lines are missing, the metadata is gone, or the file opens fine but the dimensions are off by some factor that doesn’t make sense until you realize it’s a unit conversion issue. ...