A recent revelation I had while doing Tech Support for the past few days is that not enough people make use of the Copy Settings Wizard to preserve their SolidWorks settings. I'm sure most of us have been in the position (or heard it happen to someone else) where you open a SolidWorks file and something in your user interface doesn't look quite right. The problem could be that your toolbars aren't showing up, the Design Tree won't display properly, or the Command Manager grows to a size that consumes most of the screen. Many times there isn't a known explanation for the reason the problem happened, but most of the time resetting the User's SolidWorks registry key will fix the problem.

SolidWorks users normally dread when we suggest resetting the registry to fix a problem. For anyone who has been there, the big problem is that it resets all of your SolidWorks settings to the defaults (ie: keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, system options, file locations, toolbar customization). For users working over a network, it's often very tedious to setup all of the network path information again. If you heavily customized your keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, or toolbars, the pain increases significantly.

To avoid the pain you can simply setup your SolidWorks settings/ keyboard shortcuts one time and then use the Copy Settings Wizard to save your settings. The Copy Settings Wizard can be found from Start > All Programs > SolidWorks 20XX > SolidWorks Tools > Copy Settings Wizard. The Copy Settings Wizard will save out a ".sldreg" file that can be used to restore your settings if something does go wrong and Tech Support suggests a registry reset to fix the problem. Double clicking on the ".sldreg" file will launch the Copy Settings Wizard and allow you to import your settings very easily.

One last take away is that problems with the User Interface aren't the only way a registry reset can happen. A computer that crashes and needs reformatted will also lose the SolidWorks settings you took all that time to setup. In this case the Copy Settings Wizard file that was saved on that machine will also be lost, so it's a good idea to backup your Copy Settings file to an external drive whenever possible.