I'll start this question by saying that I am a former Pro/E user, with many years of Pro/E workflows and behaviours ingrained in my psyche. One of these behaviours (controversially, even among Pro/E users) is the use of Model Items instead of Smart Dimensions wherever possible, when creating a drawing.

On a good day, with a following wind, using Model Items is a much quicker and, arguably much less error-prone way of creating a fully annotated drawing than applying Smart Dimensions one-by-one. That is not always the case, however, as the Model Items don't always show up where you expect them to, or even, sometimes, at all.

The most frequent operation immediately preceding any of my daily crashes of the Solidworks software is Dragging a Dimension. When I am in full drawing swing, producing a drawing pack for a job (not something I look forward to), I can expect Solidworks to crash out one or more times per day, usually immediately after I have dragged a dimension.

My colleagues here, coming from a more conventional Solidworks background, do not use Model Items. They Smart Dimension everything on the drawing, ignoring the dimensions that already exist in the model and, at least in theory, running a greater risk of missing dimensions.

Now for the interesting part:

My colleagues claim they have never had a crash immediately following dragging a dimension.

I am aware that Model Items is not perfect, and that it does not always bring in all the dimensions from the model.

Am I also to understand that dimensions on drawings placed using Model Items are likely to cause a crash when dragged into position, but that Smart Dimensions are not?

Am I the only person to have experienced these frequent crashes?

Do I have to bite the bullet, forget the fact that I have already dimensioned the part once and dimension it all over again, consigning the use of Model Items to the scrap heap?

Is there some flaw in my use of the command that causes the software to fall over?

This experience has been gained using Solidworks 2014, SP5.

I look forward to your response.

John