Hello,
I've had this bug for the past 5 years and have been trying to figure out what causes it and how to fix it and I haven't found anything. I recently found out that this bug was the cause of many other major bugs we had in our company.
I am currently running on Windows 7 (French version, it does matter from another bug I've had before).
I use an AMD FirePro V7900 as a graphic card
18GB of ram
Intel i7 @ 3.60GhZ
SolidWorks 2017 SP 4.0
I also use a third party program to generate my properties called CustomTools. As far as I'm aware I've had the bug both with and without this add-on so I've ruled it out of the equation.
Here is my situation, hold on tight as it may take a while to read the explanation.
When I make a new drawing, there is almost always empty view shells floating around. I do not know where they come from because my templates are empty. Those view shells generally represent every view available in SolidWorks, including Annotation views. In order for them to ''show'', I have to use the ''View>Show/Hide>Show hidden views'' which, by the way, doesn't work correctly. It doesn't show the hidden views when I use it unless I change sheet or save. When that trick doesn't work, I end up clicking around in the drawing for about 15 minutes until I can locate them as a blind man would. When they hidden views do show up, like the screenshot below, there is no way to make them show a model, they will always remain a big red X.
Here is where it gets tricky. Those view shells are not shown in the feature tree. Not only that, they are not linked to a sheet, they are linked to the drawing itself. What I mean by that is that the views show up on every sheet until you erase it from one sheet. When the views are all erased from the sheet, they never show up again on any sheet whatsoever.
Those views seem to be linked to the drawing but I haven't found a way to get them to show a model...
I usually have between 8 and 14 empty shell views floating around, I was hoping I could find either what causes it or a solution to it or even both.
Here is a screenshot to show you what I mean, I have also uploaded a .sldprt along with a .slddrw for you guys to see it. There is 9 empty shells on that drawing
Hopefully I'm not the first to get this bug and some of you can help me out with this.
Interesting. My first thought is that you are suffering from Crusty Old Template File Gotcha syndrome.
Some observations:
If you hover over one of the 'hidden' views you can right click and select 'Show' and it will appear, briefly. As soon as you rebuild, pan, zoom, etc. it disappears.
You can cut and paste the 'hidden' views to another drawing and the bad behavior remains.
You can project views from the hidden view and they behave correctly.
If 'Lock view focus' and add some notes, it will crash eventually. At least it did for me.
More observations:
Initially, Hide/Show...Hidden Views would not show anything for me, not even the orange boxes with X's. If I open the Tools....Options dialog and click OK, the boxes would appear. Rebuild, they disappear. Delete one, the others disappear, but aren't deleted. When they disappear, they can be brought back by toggling Hide/Show Hidden Views and going to Tools....Options...OK again.
Programmatically, the views don't exist. Using a macro to list all views, they are not listed.
I deleted everything from the drawing including the sheet format and saved it as a new template. I created a model of a 1"x1"x1" cube using my part template. I made a drawing using the 'bad' template and the 'ghost' views were created.
There is one view for each view in the view palette:
They appear in reverse order, from left to right, except that Current appears before Iso/Di/Tri Metric.
If you turn off this option:
in the 'Drawings' category of System Options and make a new drawing using 'Make Drawing from Part', the 'ghost' views are not created. However, as soon as you load the model in the View Palette, the ghost views will be created.