If you have the time and space, you may want to consider running it through tests in a VM, since some of them have their own stock drivers different from the machine and different from what ms claims in the devices and hardware reporting tools.
I installed VCP 7 and 8 and Shark 8 on my win vista and win 7 machines over the past 4 years, and on stock windows, compared to vista and w7 in VirtualBox, I prefer VirtualBox to host win. VCP and Shark would cause (or maybe winv and win7 would croak?) winv and win7 to turn off compositing or some such internal rendering modes before VCP/Shark would start up. Not that it mattered much to me since I only have them there as sanity checks, and I virtually never use them natively.
But, I have over the past few months seen the header/readouts go white, fonts and lines draw bolded (a precursor to or indication of Slt being past a state of safe use, and best shut down before losing the ability to shut down at my commmand rather than spontaneously), and even had instances of attempting to click on menus summarily killing Slt, taking down win7 and Slt in one keystroke or mouse click. At times is infuriating (when I'd have 40 minutes of unsaved work) and at other times is hilarious/incredible, and awe-inspiring to seek win7 go down in a lightning strike.
It seems to mostly or only happen to men when one of my ship drawings with around 10,000 non-solids and around 100 solids with some questionable (my definition, not necessarily the Slt ability to detect and or correct "questionable geometry") curves or surfaces, some that cause 5-minute load times, 3-minute saves, unless only lines, or splines are in view and most other layers are off prior to a save.
Sometimes, weird, greek-like fonts appear when I mid-stream of renaming a layer or trying to type anything other than numbers 0-9. Most shortcuts are not accepted, and only the basic, hardwired Punch! Shortcuts seem to operate. So, when I try to invoke my shortcuts to change view, draw a surface, or the the like, I now almost instinctively get a pit in my stomace and pause to ponder what I'm about to lose.
Sometimes, when this happens, the timing is just right to decompress, instead of swearing and pounding the desk, and pop in a DVD to take in 2 hours of drama or combat. Long saves durations disrupt work flow, and failure to remember to save risk marathon stretches going down the drain. I left my install disk far from my reach, and have no desire to do a complete win7 reinstall, as that requires reactivation. But my win7 install is not allowed to surf, and given the small number of apps I use, sandboxed/air-gapped from the dangers of cretins on the web, I feek okay having no patches on w7. So long as Punch! doesn't become nefarious too FORCE fail-start-on-dated-or-zero-patches, I can use my licensed installs. Fortunately, Tim is not one of those types of devs.
If you have VMWare, VBOX, or some other VM at your disposal, you may wish to see whether they make a grapical difference. OTOH, my report is probably no consolation. Then again, my machine HAS been online in SK and CN, and any number of agencies there and in the USA could have ransacked/pissed in my computer and I'd be none the wiser. I feel fortunate that I've been relatively unscathed, considering horror stories that abound (machines locked up under digital ransom, and so on.)
(I long for the day when developers make sandboxed apps that simply do not care which underlying OS is on the hardware. If I win a Powerball, I will buy up my favorite companies and pay them to make the bulk of the OS mostly irrelevant. But, I digress, and dream in futility. And, if I DID win a powerball, I'd be next in line for being decapped for daring to underrcut the bread and butter of one or two OS's methods of extracting cash from sofware devs, who in turn have to recoup from us, the end users what was scraped from them by certain OS companies.)
Note that my machine is dual-headed, 1366x708 or so on the laptop, andd 1920x10xx on the LCD. I cannot quite tell whether some of Slt's problems stem from the "main" window being on the laptop or on the extended screen, or whether it's relatedd to the 3,000,000 some pagefaults threshold reached at around 800-900 MB of RAM consumption. I just try to be mindful of wonky behavior and avoiding certain actions before doing a save. One that keep getting burned by is relatted to trying to select a control point of a spline that was derived from exploding off of the edge of a surface or solid. Certain splines that found life at some unknown-to-me stage of editing summarily CRASH Shark Lt by my mere temerity to lasso a single, seemingly harmless control point. When I'm unluck, I do not even see it coming because my focus is on the LCD, above my laptop, and the only time I know something went off the rails is when the UI is non-responsive, menus and buttons ignore clicks, and when I look down, I finally see "Shark has stopped working....", once my focus drifts or I blink and notice the dialog.
Fortunately, so far, Slt has not corrupted any of my drawings. Why do I stick with Shark? I am grateful that Tim made these programs what they are. The interface is clean/sparse and not overwhelmingly or maddeningly "busy", and because when I was on a tear to get GUI-managed solids, VC 2D/3D gave me that when TurboCAD was yanking my chain and taking me to the brink of despair and hopelessness. And, because I hold out hope that Tim will one day improve more unaddressed aspects of the layers (such as allowing user transplantation of snips of layer by importation, "grafting" and xref, something not yet possible in Slt. I'd like to save myself of some steps by copying-and-pasting geometry that carries along layers information about the entity and plops them right into the layer where I want them, without forcible acceptance of "Construction, Dimensions" other minimal branches. And, in general, I LIKE PUNCH!
Anyway, I hope your issues meet resolution!
Happy New Year, all!
