At my office, we are upgrading from I-Deas MS6 to a much newer version (I think it is 11). All of our model files have to be ran through I-Deas 8 before we can open them in the new version. I guess the advances in the software necessitated a loss of backward compatibility.
Hope this helps,
derek
meeII,
In order to pick points on a symbol, the symbol must be smashed.
The command alias to do this in my software (I-Deas Master 6A) is IS, for Instance Smash. If you want the software to do this automatically every time you insert a symbol, pick the "smash instance" toggle to turn it on...