Converting surfaces to solids in my experience can be one of the most trickiest and flaky jobs in SolidWorks. As mentioned above, about half of the time it is a knitting problem. When knitting, choose the surfaces to knit from the folder in the design tree called Surface Bodies, do not select random bodies by clicking on the model. This will ensure that you are not just creating new surfaces by your knitting. Also, if the knit fails you will know which surface is causing the problem. Once you've found a troublesome surface begin with the Delete Face command to try and rebuild the surface. If that fails, try and re-model the surface yourself using surface fill or another surface feature. If that fails, you can try to save the file as a parasolid (.x_t, or .x_b) and then import the file back into SolidWorks. Using the import diagnostics it may be able to heal gaps in surfaces or bad faces. If all of this fails, then you need to be more clever and figure out ways I have not thought about... hope this helps!
Jason
