corel graphics suite 12 problems

[_techie_]

Hi...

 

We have Corel graphics suite 12 installed on our D+T machines. It has never really worked that well for us here, with the program crashing, and being quite unstable.

 

Looking at the corel support site, it seems to be a very buggy version, with many problems when using XP.

 

I have tried almost all the suggestions, including rolling out the service packs, fixes, giving users administrative rights, running windows classic themes, turning off CARM, the auto backup, and auto save features. This seemed to solve a lot of the problems, and we stopped hearing from the department for a while, so assumed that everything was working okay, until today. I have also installed the program by hand on a flat image, setup the program, and ran the program once, rather than trying to deploy the MSI.

 

We have a locked down environment, and are using mandatory profiles for users. I have also checked all the program settings for the profiles in question.

 

Today the Head of the department came down, saying he had some cdr files which he created last year for open evening. He has since opened them today to do some updating, and they opened as 'blank' documents :confused:

 

This is strange, since the files are quite large (11 and 12MB), which is bigger than the std blank document produced by corel draw.

 

Is there anyone that has had this problem? If so, did you fix it, or move away from coreldraw entirely?

 

Is there an alternative program which I could open the cdr files to view them?

 

We don't have much money at present, but there are some other problems with the department, which might not be helping, the machines are quite old, the fibre link to the next switch is the oldest in school, and is in poor condition, and the switch is also 'old'. It doesn't seem to effect any of the other programs apart from pro desktop8 (but that has never worked either, and I do know about the extrude dll regsiter problem), but that crashes as well.

 

Just wondering if it is a graphics card/driver problem, as our dell 170l's are using onboard graphics, which is taking away the main memory for the program as well.

 

Help someone!

Mark

[ejsaunders]

Hated Corel, and don't get me started on that damn Gallery of theirs.

 

Eventually we used Xara or Visio for layout of technical drawings and charts. Some of the stations still use Corel Draw 4-10, but none use 12 its just a waste of your time to support IMO.

 

I did at one point give the dude a disconnected machine that was ONLY connected to the CNC and that had #12 on it, but fool let kids use it unsupervised and it was constantly needing ghosting. Shame I only learnt about those Reborn cards of late, that'd be most useful for it, but the comp no longer exists now.

 

Not sure about supporting the files in something else, I'll try loading on 12 and seeing if it opens in Xara if I get a moment.

[_techie_]

Hi,

 

Glad to hear its not just me then!

Think we might be licensed for Visio... Might see what the minimum specs for it are.

 

Thanks

Mark