Well, SW Corp has done it again.
They have "enhanced" another product by breaking it.
The latest build of the PDMWORKS.DLL file has MAJOR performance issues. This dll is nothing more than the API for PDMWorks. It isn't used by any of the PDMWorks Add-Ins
Vault Queries are a minimum of 20x slower making this build, for all intents and purposes, useless.
Here's a temporary workaround the I came up with today. Download The Sp2.2 Setup build for SolidWorks explorer. You can extract the SP2.2 version of PDMWORKS.DLL and replace the SP3 version. Simply overwrite it and manually register it .
I'm firmly convinced that SWCorp does little or no testing of PDMWorks Workgroup. The quality of each new release is simply a joke.