I've held off on upgrading from 2010 sp 2.1 to 3.1, partially because of the "administrative" changes, partly because of the service pack eligibility changes, partly because of the lack of time, but maybe mostly out of general distrust of SolidWorks to get things right. Plus, sp 2.1 was working just fine.
So here's what happened.
I started 2010 sp 2.1 and went to the Help menu. I clicked "Check for Updates". SW told me there were no updates available. So I went to the SW web portal, logged in, then it kicked me back to the log in screen again, so I logged in again, and it seemed to work the second time. So I downloaded the SWIM for 3.1, and ran it. I was pleased that my upgrade would be less than half a gig, so I went forward with it.
Download seemed to work perfectly, then the installation started. I got a message that it could not install because SW was still running. (It was not). It gave me an opportunity to install the upgrades to the other components, which I did, and then I got a different message that asked me to kill a certain process in the task manager. So I did, and the installation seemed to complete just fine.
Now 3.1 runs, but it takes about 3x the time that 2.1 took to start. Plus, it has about a 45 second lag for any selection, and doesn't seem to respond to any input, including trying to shut it down. I have ScanTo3D and the 3DConnexion addins enabled, but the same thing happens when they are disabled. I have not changed any other drivers or software or OS settings (win7 64 bit). The setup has been running acceptably until now.
I guess I will just uninstall and reinstall fresh, possibly going back to 2.1 if it is still available. Is anyone else seeing this?
I'm not even getting that far, Matt. After a few calls to my VAR, they decided it would be best if they sent me the updated DVD that installs "fresh" with SP3.1. Since I'm under a couple of deadlines using v2009, I've not yet tried it since receiving the DVD last week. But I've also seen some truly ridiculous things from v2009 on this machine (Windows 7, 64-bit) with parts generated with the same version and SP, but in XP (32-bit).
Anyway, if I get v2010 SP3.1 to install, I'll let everyone know. My VAR mentioned that there are some known issues with installation for people running Windows 7, 64-bit.
I can tell SolidWorks right now a good part of the problem--there is no discernment between registry entries for different versions of the software. This might be because there is also no discernment between install file names when installing SolidWorks, even considering users who know what they're doing will install to custom-named directories on their computer. So one version will over-write registry entries of another and botch the installation of one, the other, or both. Not cool. (Of course, v2009 isn't technically "supported" for Windows 7.)