Menu choice for bitmap editor in Corel draw

Disclaimer: This information is provided for experimental purposes only, not suggested for production use, not supported by tech-support, etc. And you probably want to you backup your registry before modifying it.

That being said... this should help you and others out.

First -- you should know that Windows OLE ultimately decides the application used to edit the bitmap.
CorelDRAW does do some snooping to see if Photo-Paint is installed, but when performing the edit it simply presents the bitmap in .CPT form and Windows will choose and launch the process associated with that file type.

A complication comes from the fact that legacy .CPT file ids are tagged to 'auto-convert' to the latest format. This can be undone.

The following steps should allow you to change the .CPT editor from PHOTO-PAINT X7 to PHOTO-PAINT X6. (This can be generalized to any version of PHOTO-PAINT) without uninstalling X7.

1. Open Regedit and find this key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cpt
Modify the data of the 'default' value to CorelPHOTOPAINT.Image.16
(If you've just installed X7 this value should be CorelPHOTOPAINT.Image.17)

2. Now to remove the ‘AutoConvertTo’ keys:

Search the Registry from the top for CorelPHOTOPAINT.Image.16

You should find this key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CorelPHOTOPAINT.Image.16

If it has a subkey called ‘AutoConvertTo’ then delete that subkey. This is the piece promoting it to x7.

Continue searching for ‘CorelPHOTOPAINT.Image.16’
It will appear as the ProdID in these keys:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{3090058b-eba3-bfa5-45c6-1455de49b964}
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{3090058b-eba3-bfa5-45c6-1455de49b964}

In each of these above keys, delete the 'AutoConvertTo' subkey key that you find there.

And that should do it -- .CPTs will be associated with PHOTO-PAINT X6, CorelPHOTOPAINT.Image.16 with not auto-convert to Image.17, and ultimately EditBitmap will launch PHOTO-PAINT X6.

Best of luck,
Andrew