I’VE INSTALLED SOLIDWORKS, BUT WHEN I TRY TO RUN IT, ALL I GET IS AN EXCLAMATION POINT FOR AN ERROR!

Now, error messages have never been known for being very specific, but just an exclamation point? What the heck!

So where do you go for something like this? You could call your reseller, and tell them what? I installed SOLIDWORKS and all it does is give me an exclamation point. What would they say to that? You’re kidding? Uninstall it and reinstall it? Well hold on let’s not get that serious just yet. Searching the SOLIDWORKS Knowledge Base is an option. It doesn’t always find something, but if you try to think a bit like a thesaurus and try a couple of different methods it can often yield some clues. Searching on the “!” didn’t find anything, but searching on “exclamation” found a few hits. Check out this solution it found:

Solution ID: S-035897

Question:

After installing SOLIDWORKS from an administrative image, I get an error message without any text (empty box) with an exclamation mark. What could cause this problem?

Answer:

This problem has been identified to be related to wrong properties to a registry key.
The key is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWARESolidWorksSecurity
The properties of the key is probably currently "Special permission" and should be set to "Full control" for SOLIDWORKS Simulation to work correctly.

Now messing with the registry can cause some significant repercussions, even when it doesn’t seem like it should. So you shouldn’t go alone on something like this, get your IT person or better yet, get your reseller involved. This solution provided the right fix. By simply trying to access the key we found we couldn’t. By changing the permissions on this key the install would run. The registry hang up caused the Simulation and Motion products to not install, so a repair of the installation was required to complete the install of those products.

Whew!

Jim Krivoshein, CSWP

Technical Analyst

Computer Aided Technology, Inc.