Greetings all,
I recently upgraded to CDGS 2018 from X6. Although I like many of the features and upgrades, I am very disappointed in the stability of Corel Draw 2018. I find that it crashes almost every session in a seemingly random fashion, and I have not been able to determine a pattern yet. The instability is so bad that I often just use X6 to get through a job rather than deal with the hassles of repeated crashes in 2018. By comparison, X6 crashes occasionally, but in somewhat predictable ways (usually very large files, lots of complicated fills, etc).
I am running Windows 7/64 with 8 gb of ram, SSD primary drive, and everything is fully updated. I have no serious stability issues with any other application on this system.
I welcome any thoughts or suggestions from other users who have found solutions to this irritating problem.
Update: I finally heard from Corel support and was instructed to delete temp files (among other things). Deleting temp files seemed to really improve stability. Go figure :)
Another update: it appears that the improvements I noticed were either not real or very short lived. Crashing is back with a vengeance. On the bright side, I have traced the problem to my AMD ATI video driver (ATIOAXX.DLL) for my ATI HD 5800 series video card, even though it is the latest non-beta provided by AMD. Looks like David Milisock was correct in his suspicions of an incompatibility between Corel and AMD. I submitted another ticket to see if there is a fix. We'll see what happens next.
I kept records for a few years on the AMD and the Xeon configurations and when you're talking about NON-BUG elated crashes. (BUG related crash I consider to be step A to step B to step C and always a crash) These configurations lead the pack 30 to 1. These crashed act more like system resource crashes.
Hi David, I just wanted to give you an update related to constant Corel 2018 crashing. You were right: The problem was an incompatibility with an AMD HD 5870 video card/drivers. I bought and installed a used Nvidia card of about the same vintage and capabilities as an experiment (GeForce GTX 570), and a week later I still haven't had a single crash. Prior to the video card swap CDGS 2018 crashed almost every session, sometimes more than once. Although it's not conclusive yet, the evidence strongly points toward a problem with AMD video systems.
I am annoyed and disappointed with Corel support about this because I specifically mentioned the AMD issue to tech suppt, and instead of admitting that there is a potential issue there, they sent me on a number of wild goose chases which just wasted a lot of time and created a lot of frustration. Overall, I would give Corel support a thumbs down on this experience.
Corel should either fix the problem or be up front about it to alert end users.
Is anyone from Corel support listening?
Yes it's unfortunate but it's a fact. I can't ever pin it down because my AMD system does not do it. I see the same kind of things from Xeon processor systems but I do not own one and even if I did the chances are it could be one that works ok.