Rouke,
I don't know if this will help you or not but I keep CorelDRAW version 5 on an old system to open my version 2.01 files and resave them as version 5. CD12 and X4 are able to open version 5 files. To add to the mix, most of my version 2 files are on 5-1/4" floppies so I have to keep an old 386 around that still has a 5-1/4" drive in order to first resave the files to 3-1/2" floppies. Takes me a while to open old files! I have had version 5 on an XP machine but it seemed pretty unstable. The machine that it is on now is a Windows 98SE machine.
We don't use a lot of color as most of our art is black & white line art. Most of it is pretty complex art with hundreds or thousands of objects, but we only use shades of gray for color. The only problem I've had is with text character spacing screwed up (remember WFN BOSS ?) and any text that was set to a path is screwed up.
John