Corel Draw is soooooo wonderful that.....

 Well lets see. Ive used Corel Draw since version 7. How many operating systems has windows come out with since then?. Well Ive had Corel Draw On Win 95 It sucked then. Crashed all the time. Everyday. On win 2000 it Crashed all the time every day too.. I was on nt for a short time. It crashed then too but had more problems with color and image flipping than crashing. Had Corel on XP with countless service packs (win) and have never had more problems. Its not like a person can go back to win 95 (if they wanted to.) So. How many computers would one have to buy to stay current. 3 or 4 Ive been through. So Then how can it be A system problem. You buy 5 pairs of shoes and they all hurt you in the same place. Think its the shoes or your foot? So thats cleared that up. I work for a bonified multimillion dollar per anum company. We cannot afforord to risk Pirated software. We got one of those SUCKER accounts where every time there's an upgrade its sent to us. So no its not Pirated. The problems I have, no-one else will 'fess up to. I cannot seriously believe that no one else has problems. The other staff that I work with Cuss out their installs of this "software" Just not as much as me. Perhaps Im just more vocal.

"Hey Andy, Mine works fine"! Good for you! You are very very very lucky.  Perhaps you dont have one or two day turn arounds with complex drawings. where your fingers move faster than ur dual processor 512 ram 2 gig machine can keep up!

This newest system was wiped clean. Used a 3 or 5 times wipe util to clean it. CorelDraw was first on after windows. So........ figure that one out.

Problems....

1)  Use the node pick tool to area select nodes with geometry behind. It will select it too then crash.

2) Crash and corel crashes again during the crash. HAH thats frigging great. LAUGHABLE

3) Dig select until you hit a bitmap. Crash

4) open a document with missing fonts. Bitstream kicks in, crashes Adobe Distiller then hangs permanantly.

5) Open a document. it crashes and offers a rescue then crashes when opening the rescue.

6) Power clip a screen shot. Will more than likely make the file un-openable again.

7) Close a file with a days work. Come in and open it the next day to an empty page.

8) spend a while arranging layers and naming them. Go into a powerclip and come back out AFTER TWENTY BLOODY HOURS and find your layers have mysteriously renamed themselves.

9) Layers Dissapear but select an object on that layer and the layer name still shows up in the property bar.

10) Layer Docker dissapears completely. I have a nice desktop to look at through the hole though. LAUGHABLE

11) Power clip into a group. Happens accidentally but is still possible. Ouch.

12) Open a document. Crash. Stran

Stefan Lindblad said:

I dont have that problem myself. Sorry to hear you have a bad day. Use the F8 key, re-install, or why not see if it is something else bugging in the background. A classic dll file?? Have you been installing and reinstalling different software on myour computer?. Hey there many reason to why yu might have a bad day with CDGS.

ge though how I can open it later... Sometimes. Whats with that?

 

there is soooooo much more that I cannot recall right now.

ok the f8 thing. Hmmmmmm I dont believe I have EVER seen software that claims on itself that you have to reset the workspace because it gets unstable. HOW WEAK. Thats complete BS. (Corel) Try coding a solid GUI instead. Isnt that what we pay for??? Lets just stop patching patched patches with hot fix glue. stop releasing x4 x5 x6 x7 x8 and concentrate on a solid app. Charge a lil more and things will work.

I have done everything in my power to get this app to 'behave'. It wont. So now I am committed to slamming it since over the last ten or so years ive been steadily and increasingly slammed by it.

Everyone says OOOOOOH I dont have that problem or  We cant recreate that. Well then I guess Im a liar and this is all a figment of my imagination. I enjoy wasting more time after crashing, posting grievences. Trust me. I do give credit where credit is due. For instance..... thank god after 5 years of complaining Corel finally changed the double click bitmap annoyance. I think, too, that some but not all of the bitmap effects with transparency work properly now aswell. The node count on contours, I believe has been addressed also. Thats wonderful. It helps with the mem load.

Fix the powerclip, Fix the node tool, Fix the text. My god fix the text. Scrap bitstream or something I dont know what but It sux. Fix the layers pallette.

Well Im done.... sorry for all that but hey......

with deepest sorrow and regret,

 Andy

Hi Andy!

I understand your "non-disclosure" situation well.  I occasionally do work for Honda and some of the other car manufacturers as well (I know... a long way from medical illustration) and I can't show those to anyone either (non-disclosure agreements).  A pain, really, because it's some of my best work and no one ever gets to view it.

Yep, your right.  I avoid bitmaps like the plague!  I even create vector textures with little dots and such to keep from using the textures feature in Corel.

Maybe that's part of your crashing problem.  I'm guessing that your image files (with all the bitmaps, etc.) are quite large.  What's the file size of your typical image? This whole thing might be a memory related issue.

Rob

Rob, My files are anywhere from 10 megs upto I think my largest was about 128 megs. not entirley sure about that.  But check this out. I import Jpgs daily, into draw and right before I wrote this I got this error.  I hope you can see it. Weird. Try using the import command to import a Jpeg and Corel tells me It doesnt want to . It says to try to open it Like a vector drawing..... Think iIm gonna crash so I'ld better save LOL.

Regards,

 Andy

Andy!  I'm reeling... 128 megs!  That image I sent you was 200k in vector.  I guess I'm living a sheltered life.  I've had files that big in photo shop in the past, but I thought I could smell smoke coming from my tower when I was doing it .

This may be why your crashing.  There are some pretty high end tech wizards on this forum.  I'm wondering if one of them could suggest a memory management solution for this.  I know there are ways to reconfigure how Corel uses memory.  Maybe this is something that would help.

Might be worth starting a new thread entitled "128 megs crashes draw" or something like that and see if one of those wizards has a solution.

Rob

 Rob,

128mb isn`t the end of the world. Did a box layout  and the file (bitmaps, transparencies, vector and text) was over 325MB with files saved as .cdr and .ai. in both RGB and CYMK versions and converted to .jpg clip mask segments from the .cdr file to the client for viewing. My biggest "nuisance" (but a God sent necessity) was the Auto Backup every 20 minutes. More than once did I think the program had locked up untill I saw the Progress Bar moving. Had one "crash" in X3 but none so far in X4 while using thst file.

My worst problem (in X3....hasn't happened in X4) was, when having multiple 14mb (12-16 images) camera images on the screen at the same time, resaving the multi image document because about 10% of the time I had one of the bitmaps mysteriously changed to a .eps file format. I got the "Error when saving" window and would have to click on all the bitmaps to find the bum one and convert it back to a bitmap. Never found out why that happened.

I've had problems, like everyone else, and the program has shut down ( only once with X4 so far...when my answering machine came on during an auto backup of that 325mb file) But I've never experienced ( 4 computers, Win 95 to XP, corel V4,6,9,10 -short lived-,11,X3,X4) but never anything like the problems that Andy has described. 

BTW: Andy.......Are you running Corel from separate installs on each the office computers or from a common (network server) source ? Installs from disc or download ?

 

Ted

 

Thank you all For suggestions. I will take a look at up dating drivers for video card but our IT dept stays up on that pretty good as well as keeping windows current.

Yani, I do all of the things you suggested in the bullet points. Only I dont always clean up the file space (drawing desktop) as I frequently have to come back and revise using elements that are tough to duplicate. Converting things to bmp IMOP is the best thing to do espesially lenses and bitmaps with lenses applied. Most of the crashes I experience do not seem to be file size related. There is no prejudice when crashing. I have on many many occasions had files that just would not save, at all, no matter what. I would go through the drawing endlessly deleting objects and groups of objects looking for the offending item until finally through fits of futility I would ctrl A and delete everything. Even then the file would not save. Hmmmmm. Well I have started multiple save as attempts and that IS the only way.

Perhaps a good thing for the next version would be, as Autodesk does with Max, is to include a lil plus button next to the save as dialog. Pressing adds an increment number onto the file name so you dont have to futz around with renaming the files. Very convenient and everyone loves pressing buttons.

Well here I go on another day of fun. I will ask IT to look at all my drivers and make sure Im up to date.

Thanx all

 Andy

 I have no idea of what to tell you except that I just closed a map file that had two images in it for a total of over 700 megabytes and several vector and text objects.  Not a typical file but surely not the largest I've worked on.

As a support technician myself I would recommend an environmental/work habit study.

I agree with David here. I think you are experiencing virtual memory and available disk space issues. That would be my guess. I've had vector illustrations with over 3000 objects/layers open for weeks without any problems. I've had a gigs big raster files open in DRAW... Worked fine.

Why are you importing jpeg files anyway? Is it a place holder for a bigger, cleaner file?

It is your machine and file saving structure that is causing your problems... I guarantee it. CorelDRAW is and always has been super stable for me. Sorry.

I think what you are experiencing is I don't know what.

All I can say is when trouble shooting start at the base and work your way up.

1. Hardware

Memory and disk checks

2. OS

Are updates loading?

Are the issues with DLLs not being registered?

Registry full of BS?

3. Application

Did it load correctly in the first instance?

Rebuild the workspace? (F8)

 

If you can reproduce crashes on multiple machines doing the same thing then look at what makes those machines the same and change that thing in one machine and see what happens.

If you have 5 machines you can afford to take one off line and muck with it. Start by changing the video card to a Matrox card. That is pretty much the gold standard for reliable.

 

At least some issues should be resolved in the X4 service pack. But there has never been a big lot of screeming during the beta process and beyond about application crashes. There were just little things and issues with new features.

I can make Draw crash if I do stupid things. Like load bitmaps that are way too big. But I'm running it on a P3 933 with only 640mb of ram and a very ordinary graphics card with better stability than any previous version.