This past year we were unable to renew our maintenance for solidworks for the same reason many other companies could not.  Without getting into the economy and politics I will get right down to my point.  When you do not renew your maintenance for Solidworks they lock out your ability to download updates from the website and installation manager.  This is understandable, because if you are not under maintenance you should not receive any new versions or service packs.  The key word here is new.  I believe you should be able to access the service packs and versions of solidworks that were made available during your maintenance period.  This is not the case though.  Solidworks locks you out of the download section completely if you do not renew your subscription.  For example, if your maintenance ended with you using solidworks 2009 x32 SP 4.1 and you decide to upgrade your computer to a 64-bit system with solidworks 64-bit and want to install service pack 4.1, you will not be able to.  Solidworks needs to find a way to still allow you to download the service packs that you paid for and block access to the ones that were released after your maintenance has expired.  Now because we upgraded our systems from x86 to 64-bit we have to go back to using solidworks 2009 SP 0.0 with all its flaws as opposed to the SP 4.1 that we have been using for the last year without issue.  Has anyone else felt this frustration?  Doesn't the over $250,000 we have dished out over the last 10 years count for anything.  I contacted our VAR to see if he could download the files I needed for me and post them on our FTP site but they said they were not authorized to do so unless we renewed our maitenance.  Did I mention there is a penalty to re-enroll your subscription?  Its $500 per seat, no exceptions.

"Boy, they really got my balls in a juice blender this time"