I am a student and have tried numerous versions of Simulation Mechanical. After a few years of on/off use of the products with very frequent crashing, I think I have finally figured out the problem (at least in my case and now confirmed by one of my colleagues).
The software seems to crash as soon as there is a minor loss in internet connection, even if this loss is not necessarily noticeable otherwise in the system. The error thrown up is usually a licensing one. On a day with a lot of network problems with my university's wi-fi, we had 19 crashes of Sim Mech 2017 that took an OS reboot to fix.
The worst part is that these crashes corrupt the current .FEM file. The only fix I've found is deleting the .FEM file with all associated files, in order for it to work with more advanced features, specifically Parametric Study. This leads to the software being rather unusable.
Looking back, this might have been a consistent cause of most of the crashes I've had with Simulation Mechanical. More Stability would definitely make it a much more usable software!
