So, I suddenly found a lot of things to read once I knew what to look for,
tried to revert to status before last windows update. Message appeared on screen after a good 30 minutes saying something in the line of "Couldn´t find files needed to perform the task"
"Abort?" After confirming, the system rebooted. Sketchup is back to its normal behavior again. I guess this is the new "Normal"... Thanks for the help anyway.

Thankyou for the suggestions. Much appreciated, will check this asap..

As of today, january 8th 2018, select tool does not work for me.

I have Sketchup Pro 2015, 15.3.331 and spend in average 4 hrs a day with Skup - all year round. I´m producing house building plans along with build application drawings, as well as my own hobby projects. Sketchup 2015 covers all my needs and I did never see the need for upgrading. I´m a retiree and help people with this work for the fun of it, not for the money.

Today my select tool behaves like so: I draw a rectangle around the objects I want to select and the borders start to crawl from upper left corner of selection downward to the lower right corner. This behavior repeats itself (very slowly) three times over and then - nada.
Nothing is selected. I have restarted the computer and Sketchup several times...

My Windows 10 had an update yesterday evening - have no idea wether Microsoft have distributed a remedy for Meltdown security vulnerability? Yeah, I have been accused of being a conspiracy theorist..

When I prepare a Layout document for presentation of a building seen from different views, in architecture drawings I usually whish to utilize sciography to give a little depth to a 2D-view of the various facades. I can change the view for every selection of the model, front, back, left and so on.
I can turn shadows on and off but it does not look good when the front view of the building has a nice
shadow under the overhang of the roof while the backside view shows the building in total shadow.
Showing the backside view without shadows isn´t what I want so I have to save every view of the building in a separate file and rotate the building in respect to the sun to get the sciography element. It´s kind of counterproductive as it imposes a lot of extra work and consideration if and when you have to revise the model - and you usually have to do that...
I whish it shouldn´t have to be this difficult to get a nice "sciographic" presentation out of Layout.

Added for clarification: It is possible to change every viewports setting for shadowing individually but - traditional sciographic embellishment is only possible on one facade at a time. Good looking shade under the roof on one side gives not so good looking shade on opposite facade. So to get similar shades on every facade you have to rotate the building 90 degrees under the sun, for every viewport - hence creating 4 individual drawings. I´m only referring to ISO-metric 2D pictures of the facades. Every other aspect of sciography is very nicely accomplished within Skup and LO and I use it a lot..

I found a newer driver and also specified NVidia for SketchUp as You suggested.
Auto-save is disabled. I´ve been working 5 hrs whithout crasching now. (Awkward though, pressing Ctrl+S with fingers crossed..) Thankyou all for all help and suggestions

No SUsolid extension and Autosave disabled.
Disabling harwdare acceleration results in jerky movement when orbiting but alas no fallback to wireframe presentation.
I just let the "Budsplat"-window do the reporting. Does it go to Trimble - I don´t know.. hope it does

As I mentioned earlier, Intel HD graphics and NVidia GPU seems to be negotiating (Automatic choice). when in "Automatic" and there is a small delay when orbiting a lot of 3-D geometry.
If I choose Integrated (Intel HD) the model goes into wireframe when orbiting and movement gets jerky

I will search the forum for info on how to "tune" hardware acceleration for NVidia. There seems to be some settings in Controlpanel for NVidia that affects a choosen application and SketchUp is listed in those settings. Most of the terms are pure jibberisch for me so I´ll have to read up on the subject..

This is becoming more and more troublesome. I have some really nasty bugsplats since upgrading from V8 to 2015. I used to have a good throughput of work in SketchUp 8 on my old computer. The computer was nothing special, a HP Dragon laptop with 21" monitor (well that may be somewhat unusual..)
Thing is, I couldn´t leave the computer idle and let it go to sleep or it begun to loose handle on various plugins. It´s like windows 7 was leaking memory or something of that nature?

So when I decided to upgrade to 2015, I managed to sell the government the proposal of getting a newer, better computer, and she approved.. I tested the computer for a week or so, mainly how well it managed to rotate 3D-objects whitout hick-ups and I was pretty impressed with the new laptop. an Asus gaming computer. The INTEL internal graphics and NVidia GeForce GTX 860M seems to negotiate who´s doing what when needed and I have noticed a short delay when NVidia takes over should I try to orbit heavy 3D scenery but it never falls back to wireframe graphics like the older computer did.

Now I have these bugsplats no end. Adjusting size of material = Bugsplat.
Copying objects along an axle and making multiple copies at the same time = Bugsplat.
Leaving the computer asleep with SketchUp active - just to have dinner.. on resume = Bugsplat.
I´m beginning to experience carpal tunnel syndrome from hitting "Ctrl S" every 30 seconds, (well- maybe a huge exageration...)
The only use for the computer is SketchUp Pro 2015, WoodExpress, an engineering software for timberframes and roof trusses, plus Wufi from Fraunhofer institute for calculation of transient hygrothermal behaviour of multi-layer building components.

I have disabled all plugins, restarted computer but no difference. All maintenace for OS and virusprotections is done on regular basis. Yep, I do send bugsplat reports but it doesn´t help me now.

My biggest concern is that now I´m in a position where I can´t open my work in SketchUp 8 anylonger whithout redrawing everything and I have done a lot in SketchUp 2015 and I´m on a deadline...

Please- Do anyone have a suggestion other than that I did buy a crappy computer?
Specs of the Asus G771JM-T7080H
Intel i7-4710HQ
8Gb RAM DDR3L
1 Tb SATA
Windows 8.1 64bit

This was officially a moment where I needed the "DOH"-plugin a.k.a Homer-plugin.
I can only blame myself for working too long hours preparing for build-permit application and not taking care of the need for sleep.
Oh, yes - I reinstalled every plug-in as reccommended, Sketchup 2015 in win 8.1 is nothing like v8 in win 7 when it comes to where installation places files and catalogues. I learned the hard way...
Thank You Dave and a Happy New Year!

I don´t understand this. Installed Sketchup 2015 Trial (now runs as Pro - 28 more days, then Make...)
Installed the plugins I´m used to have in Skup 8 and when I try to set the keyboard shortcuts I get this strange behavior.

When I type "+" in the field "Add Shortcut", the field reads "=" sign
In the field named "Filter", if I type the "+" sign, the field reads "+" allright.
(I don´t intend to use + as a filter - it´s just for checking that my keyboard is OK...)
What is this all about?

I bought Sketchup 8 because I needed it. So far I have had a tremendous ball with it and learned a heck of a lot about using Skup by browsing this forum. I have produced architectural drawings and construction drawings for several housing projects. Along with numerous welding projects of my own - vehicles, tools and of course my (in-)famous inventions.

A couple of years ago I left Google because I hate what they are doing. In short - I don´t need Google.

And now I´ll be leaving Trimble. Simply because they don´t offer anything worth paying for with Sketchup 2013. I NEVER had any difficulties finding the excellent plugins I whished for. Some were free, others I payed for - easy as pie.. But this so called upgrade is pure vaporware and an insult to the users. Curved leaders and hatched patterns in Layout?
For me, this community represents the really knowledgeable users of sketchup and there seem to be no communication with SU developing team? It makes no sence.

Now I´m keeping an open eye for something akin to Sketchup but as soon as the term "annual service-fee" pops up - I´m gone.. As I will be as soon as they talk about the "cloud".