VW crashes badly when it runs out of memory

[GRC]

I use VW09 Mechanical on the Mac. I have been plagued for years by a problem I finally identified.

Several years ago VW crashed my whole computer. Corrupted the file extensions so I could not read VW files. Screwed up other system functions.

It took me ~ 6 months to get my computer back to normal. I had to delete my user profile and start a new one. Lost a lot of info.

Now that OS 10.6.3 is out, I have had some system crashes as well. Corrupted the file extensions, but I was able to redo them with the Get Info commands. This time it didn't destroy my user profile (thanks Apple).

I finally found out what is causing the crashes. Poor memory control. I watched the Activity Monitor as VW tried to convert a file to DWG. I started with 1GB of free memory. When it got down to 6MB the whole system crashed, not just VW. This is extremely poor memory management by VW.

I now keep the Activity Monitor open all the time to gauge whether VW will process a memory intensive file or not.

Since this is certainly what happened 2 years ago, VW doesn't seem to care. They add functions and raise the price, but don't get the basics right.

[Ray Libby]

1GB of free memory is not much to start with, how much total memory do you have? Some more system specs would help to troubleshoot this. This is not a common problem.