Doug, if you'd like to see where PTC/Pro/E are headed, take a look at Pro/DESKTOP. It's a genuine Windows program which has eliminated all the Unix goofiness of Pro/E and implemented real, throrough object action modelling. It is, as it says, built on Granite, so ultimately, it is capable of anything Pro/e is, but for now, they've stuck to the basics: modelling, assembly and drawing. You should try it just to see something you'll never see in Pro/E. First, you open and use it full screen, no 'Menu manager'. Then you open several models, all in the same desktop, instead of spawning new instances of the program for each model. And, under its Window menu, you have the option to tile or cascade each of these windows within the same program window and each with its own feature tree. I didn't try this yet, but I suspect it is the foundation for the ability drag/assemble parts to an assembly. And not once did it get confused about what window was active. Ctrl-A means, as it does in the GUI standard, select all, not the goofy 'Activate window' because your $30 grand program is too stupid to figure out that the very last window open MUST be the active one. That kind of goofiness is gone in Pro/DESKTOP. Everything PTC said for all those years about why it had to be that way just seems to have vanished. No 'set working directory': I got parts from three different directories, assembled them, saved the assembly to a fourth directory, closed it and had no trouble opening it back up again. Just as you'd expect of a Windows program. Also, the graphics are spectacular, better than Pro/e's, much better than SolidWorks. The shading is basic but the see-through view setting is like setting all the part colors to transparent in Pro/e only much better. It's like looking through different pastel shades of lightly etched glass. And there's even a button that gives you quick access to cross sections by picking any plane as a cut plane. Do this trough an assembly with translucent view, it's unbelievable. They should go to Best Buy or CompUSA and get it bundled with the other software on new Dells. If you used it for a while, you'd see what was wrong with Pro/e. Yeah, it's Pro/e, not you.
Your problem, along with many long-time users of Pro/e, is that you've adapted to the goofiness and specialized in finding 'workarounds'. Pro/e is the workaround capital of the universe. By now, everyone thinks that a config.pro and a separate default.dtl file and config.mech and color.map and syscol.scl and a bunch of other random configuration files is normal. They've gotten used to figuring out what obscure C++ variable names mean in config.pro and ferreting out what they do (though I'm still not sure about absolute and relative accuracy, I'm sure it's a scam). But the silliness has gone on for so long that PTC's perennial shuffling of menu items must seem like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I think they are making some progress, but slowly, hesitantly, inconsistently. For example, after I got Wildfire and started trying out some tutorial stuff, I tried using it full screen, thinking man, that'd be some progress. I thought they'd finally gotten rid of stinking Menu manager, but then I was looking for Setup to change units. It was up under Edit. But it just opened the Setup Menu manager. So, it's partly gone, but not consistently. The object/action paradigm is only partly implemented. If they would just get it where it's going and then quit fiddling with it for a few years, instead of dragging it out like the US so-called transition to metric, everyone would be a lot happier. And the improvements would be noticeable and untainted by the current inconsistency.
David Janes