At work we had created an assembly drawing from another assembly drawing (File, Save As). We use SW 2009 SP1.

During editing of the saved as drawing a new assembly was created (file, save as also) due to the items needed to be shown being different than in the original assembly. The original assembly drawings were removed from all sheets and only the new assembly was referenced (or needed to be referenced) in the drawing.

This also created a 21,000 KB drawing file and very slow redraws and sluggish performance.

Using File, Find References we found that the original assembly file was still listed (remember it is not in the new drawing any more). After spending about an hour trying to unlink this reference and removing much hair we stumbled upon a work around.

Close SolidWorks (save the file) and go into windows exploder (sorry, Explorer) and move the assembly file to a new location. Then open the new drawing file, of course you get the pop-up window asking you if you want to find the missing (unused) file, say no, save and close.

Reopen the drawing file and you will find that the unused reference is no longer there. You can now move the assembly file back to its original location and the new drawing file will not relink to it.

The new drawing file size is now 1,000 KB, wow 20,000 KB smaller, and redraws and performance are greatly improved.

Seems to us that not being able to break a bad reference link in any way through SolidWorks or SolidWorks Explorer is just plain dumb. An unneeded reference not only made performance of the drawing file poor it also made the drawing file oversized.

Anyone else notice this?