Either in the model or in Prefs (or, maybe in both, with one able to override or never be overriden by the other), there should be a way to CONSTRAIN a translation.

In ortho, I translated what i thought was only one line of interest. It turned out that (going on 7 minutes now) instead I translated the vertex of a surface, which is associatiated with a solid. The area was only some 3 square feet, and the solid was only 15mm thick. The translated vertex must have gone thousands of feet or meters into the distance because VC 7 Pro is not interruptable.

I KNOW that I am not creating cells or crystalline structures or deep-space entities, so I know that any geometry I extend should be less than 180 meters away at most. If there were a way to say, "Constrain translated moved or copied POINTS to less than 3 meters away; Constrain moved or copied translated surfaces to less than X meters away, the CPU would not be bogged down calculating bazillions of surface and solid values.

The same could apply to generation of new entities or geometry so that no inadvertent entity selections yield any surface or solids operations that could send the CPU into a coma or uninterruptable state.

Is my assumption correct/valid?

I've done that a few times.
I try to make an effort to stare at what I typed before hitting the return/enter key and think about the consequences.:-)

Hehehehe....


I DO stare, but sometimes not long enough. Still, it would be nice if CAD programs as a rule offered the user a protective skin or boundary to prevent this sort of thing from happening. On paper, we can tear it with a too-fine point, and cannot draw through the desk, thanks to physics. In CAD, we can extend one or more lines to CAD-Infinity, and the attendant "comatose states" are why it is a good reason to open two instances of a CAD app -- one for work that might crash on you, and another for what-ifs and referencing supporting files. Of course, it would be very nice if VC could share clipboards between multiple instances of VC. Better yet if VC instances had a private clipboard built JUST for VC or for compatible CAD apps. But, the conduit should not ever allow a crashing app to tear down any apps sharing the clipboard/conduit.