Displaying SolidWorks thumbnails in the folder can help us quickly find the drawing files that need to be opened. However, sometimes after installing SolidWorks, the thumbnails of the drawing files are not displayed in the folder. The solution is as follows:
1. Open SolidWorks, click "Options-System Options-General" and check "Show thumbnails in Explorer".
2. Continue to click "System Options - File Explorer", click "Restore File Associations", and then click "OK"; shut down and restart the computer. If the thumbnail is not displayed in the folder, proceed to the next step.
3. Open any folder, find and click "...—Options" on the far right side of the upper toolbar.
4. Click "View" in the pop-up dialog box, scroll down to find "Always show icons, never show thumbnails" and uncheck it , then click "OK" .
5. Return to the desktop, right-click "This PC" and click "Properties".
6. Click "Advanced system settings".
7. Click "Advanced" in the pop-up dialog box, and then click "Settings" in the "Performance" box.
8. In the pop-up dialog box, check "Show thumbnails instead of icons" and click "OK". Shut down and restart the computer. If the thumbnail is not displayed in the folder, proceed to the next step.
9. Find "sldwinshellextu.dll" and "sldthumbnailprovider.dll" in the installation directory. The file paths are:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\SolidWorks Shared\sldwinshellextu.dll
C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp\SolidWorks\sldthumbnailprovider.dll
(If the SolidWorks installation disk is on the D drive, look for these two files in the D drive)
10. Then copy these two files to the c:\windows\system32 folder.
11. Enter "CMD" in the Windows search tool, then click "Open" and enter "for %1 in (%windir%system32*.dll) do regsvr32.exe /s %1" at the end of the pop-up dialog box. Then press the "Enter key" to run the program and wait for the registration to complete to solve the problem.
