Why does Corel Draw Graphics Suite X5 feel more like beta software?

Iv been a Corel user since 1994 and the last version I bought was 11 and have used it happily. I moved to X5 for the new features and multi core support.  Iv had to redo so much work as a result of using Corel Draw X5. To clarify, I do have the boxed retail edition of X5 and never had the demo running the aft mentioned machine.

I would say I have a fast and capable enough machine to run X5. I have a Corei7 920 running at 4.3Ghz , 6Gb's of RAM, a ATI HD5770 and im running Win 7 64bit. Its a fresh install. The overclock is solid and have torture tested running two instances of Prime95 pushing all cores, 8 threads to 100% for 25 hours with no errors. Memory tested with Memtest 15 hours with no errors. Windows 7 is fully updated, No Anti Virus installed, and the only other Applications installed are After Effects CS4 and Cinema4D Studio R11.5. I had many of the same issues in the Corel X5 trial on my WindowsXP SP3 machine.

Yes i have had the same results not overclocked. After Effects and C4D have been Solid.

Uninstall and reinstall shows no improvement in the issues faced. Safe mode=no change, F8 on PP startup= no change.

 

  1. My issues are mainly concerning Photopaint which iv spent the most time in.
  2. When Using the drop shadow tool, If i split the shadow from the object, 95% of the time there is a crash. even if thats the first thing done as soon as i start up PP.
  3. Copy and paste objects with drop shadow, i would say 6 out of ten times causes an error or crash.
  4. seems to be a memory leak, having Photopaint open and system manager open i can see a rise in the use of memory just doing nothing. it takes time but PP starts to eat memory all by itself. 
  5. minimize, maximize and close buttons disapear after a bit from all image windows in PP.
  6. Autosave popping up while manulay saving can cause a crash 
  7. quite a few out of memory errors even though i have several gigabytes free.
  8. if using PP for say more then 10 minutes and sometimes less, many times when i go to save or export, all thumbnails in the explorer view of the save dialog are missing and pressing save does nothing. clearing all memory from Edit>Purge menu item will sometimes bring the ability to save the project back.
  9. The errors happen with any size file, any type of file. I can reproduce the same errors over and over.
  10. Of course Corel Connect is a known offender of doing nothing but crashing Photopaint.
  11.  Some other things like ungrouping  layers or combining lays can cause an crash.

 

LIke some of the other Corel versions I had, i had to wait for service packs and patches to have a solid running copy of Corel. But in a professional setting, using software that has this many issues seriously hurts productivity and is a time and money waister. Iv read numerous posts here and in other forums of people having issues like mine or worse with X5.