weird solidworks dimension error

Just in the last day my copy of solidworks has been acting very strange.

In parts, assemblies and drawings, the diameter symbol has been replaced with <MOD-DIAM> , and so on for every symbol in every dimension type. It is extremely annoying visually, and also a pain to manually fix on drawings. Any Ideas?

Try creating a new default blank template, go to the customizations and set all your preferences up again. Then go to copy settings wizard under:

all programs, solidworks, tools, copy settings wizard and have it save your current settings and then reload those settings. It happened at our school also, maybe this might help.

What version is it?

Just as an fyi:
The <MOD-DIAM> is the code all DIAMETER dimensions have that tells the program you want a diameter symbol represented.

If you look at the properties of a normal dimension, you would see just <DIM>.

There are plenty more codes like that within the dimensions of SolidWorks, & you can override all of them, but you didn’t hear that from me. (This is all supposed to be parametric don’t forget. lol)

I know I ran across that problem when we upgraded from 2006 to 2008.

SW 2008 is a joke plain & simple. There are way too many bugs in it!
If you have the option to skip that version & go right to 2009 when upgrading, do it!!

2009 is pretty solid! I hated 2008, would crash and it had so many random bugs in it.

I’ve been using 2008 for months and have had no problems with it at all.

What service pack are you using?

SP3. I haven’t had the time to upgrade to SP4 yet.

SP5 is out, but don’t you get those random crashes or if you try to render a humongous assembly it crashes. Also, doesn’t it sometimes not able you to select a command and fully go through with it.

SP3.1 over here.

My bugs have to do mostly with drawing issues. Things not updating correctly, and blocks not acting nicely from the 2006 version.

Modeling is fine for the most part now… (now that we changed out my video card. - Everyone else’s is still on order, and they get blue screens closing the program…How awesome is that… :rolleyes: ) I had 6 blue screens in one day before my video card was swapped out.

<Mod-Diam> was just an example, all such codes we’re showing up.

However, Dave Black from 968 told me to restart; problem solved :rolleyes: .