I recently had to replace a dead hard drive in my computer. Among many other programs I reinstalled CorelDraw X6. About a week ago I ran into a problem with Windows explorer. In the course of solving it I did a repair on my Windows XP installation. Now neither CorelDraw nor Photopaint will open. I get the splash screen and then the user interface, but before the "What's New" dialog box opens the programs hang.
After trying a restart of the computer to no effect I decided to uninstall the X6 Graphics Suite and reinstall it. That's when I discovered it won't run the uninstall. I then tried just reinstalling and that wouldn't work either. I don't get an error message, just a blank space on the screen and a button on the taskbar.
In desperation I decided to go back to X5, only to find that it won't install either.
I'd REALLY rather not reformat the hard drive and start all over. Does anyone have any ideas about how to fix this?
Hello,
I am not sure about exact location of this folder in XP. But probably it should be this...
C:\Documents & Settings\<user account>\Application Data\Corel
Over here you'll see a folder named "CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6". Try renaming this folder to something else. Do not delete this folder just yet. After renaming, try to launch Draw. If it loads fine, then you can safely delete the renamed folder. When you rename the folder, a fresh folder with default settings will be created.
I'm afraid that didn't work either.
The more I think about it the more convinced I am that it was the repair of WIndows XP that broke X6. Not only was the program working before I did that, I've found other things that the repair process messed up.
I had noticed that the graphics performance of the system was really slow. When I checked it I found that the repair had wiped out my graphics card's driver. Reinstalling it fixed the performance issue.
Then earlier tonight I checked the overall system configuration and discovered that the repair had rolled Windows XP back to Service Pack 2. It had also removed .cdr and .cpt from the list of registered file types. I'm going to reinstall SP3 tomorrow and see what effect that has.
Yes, I think you have found the answer. XP SP2 is now many many years old. Most programs produced in the last couple of years will specify SP3 or a later version of windows.
But I'm sure windows automatic updates should have detected that SP3 was missing and offered an update. You will also need rather a lot of other updates when you have SP3 installed to bring it to current standard.
To be safe, I'd suggest reinstalling .net 4.x once you have SP3+updates, and then reinstall CorelDraw.
When you have everything working, it might also be wise to create a SP3 repair CD, so that you can at least skip the SP2 stage if you need to do further repairs.
Well, I installed Windows XP SP3 and was finally able to repair Corel X6. Both CorelDraw and Photo Paint are working now. Thanks to everyone who helped with this.
Glad to hear it, and I'm wondering whether some of the other obscure and unsolved problems in other threads might be due to accidental reversion to SP2 while doing a windows repair.
SP3 has been around for so long now that most of us probably presume that everybody who says XP has SP3 -- and indeed, most users probably wouldn't be aware that their repair had reverted their system to SP2.