In view of what you already tried in order to solve the problem (which makes sense to me), I am beginning to think that there is a hardware problem on the machine. PhotoPaint has rarely given me crash problems on any type of computer or operating system. What if you temporarily swap the graphic card from an other machine to see if the crashing continues?
My I inquire as to what operating system you're using? I see that you've posted XP 32 and 64 bit but is it XP or Vista? 32 or 64 bit?
If you have this problem on fresh OS installs then we need to look at hardware configurations. What are the hardware specs, specifically the main board, RAM and video card?
Also try and run something more modern then V12 we are at version 14.
ignis: this sytem actually has two Nvidia FX-1700 cards. I've tried using just one card. swapping, rebooting, and using the other card. It's possible that both are defective, but I was assuming the card wasn't the problem since I did try more than one. It has crashed with every set of drivers I've used from the current version back in June of last year to the most recent ones released by Nvidia in February of 2009.
David: This system is the only one crashing Photopaint, and it also happens to be the only one in our environment with 64-bit hardware. It is a Dell T7400.
Processor: Intel Quadcore Xeon, MB: Dell based on Intel 5400 chipset, RAM: 4GB (passed memtest overnight), 2 Nvidia FX1700 graphics cards, PSU: 980W.
As for the version, we have used the trial version of X4 and photo paint worked fine. In v12, all other programs other than photo paint work fine. We can consider upgrading, but I would like to try to solve this first.
Thanks again for all the help. Jim
also, the OS is XP.
The problem is really puzzling. Perhaps X4 addresses memory differently than V12 does. In combination with the fact that the specs of a particular type of DELL may seem similar, the internals of the machine may be quite different. I suspect though it has something to do with RAM or chipset. I hope you will be able to sort this out. I am now curious to what actually caused it.