I want to quickly follow-up on yesterdays blog post and provide some additional information about this. After digging into this from both Corel's and Microsoft's sides, it appears that the knowledge base article requires further clarification and will be updated shortly. To summarize the conclusion so far, the problem is not with CorelDRAW or the CorelDRAW .CDR file format, but appears to be related to the import filters from MS Office. Computerworld, eWeek and other publications had good coverage about this today.
As mentioned yesterday, Corel is currently not aware of any security issue related to CorelDRAW or the CorelDRAW .CDR file format (or any other product / file format from Corel for that matter). If there was a known problem that had security implications, we would get this resolved as quickly as possible.
Update (Jan 5, 2008): David LeBlanc posted additional information on his blog.
Update 2 (Jan 6, 2008): Everything is clarified - Computerworld posted another article about it yesterday, followed by BetaNews.
I think I used their fix to enable the filter in any case. And I'm certainly having no problem here.
That remains are very badly described change. What versions were effected? The MS blog indicated that they had disabled all CDR OLE over the clipboard. Was this some other filter?
It was very poorly reported in the Internet media. Some articles on it created the illusion that it was WordPerfect files.
Even reading what you have written above I first read as...
CorelDRAW.OLE objects.
Sounds now like it was totally blown out of all proportion.