CorelDraw 9 crashing badly

[JVegVT]

I had a horrible day today. I'm working on an 8-1/2 by 22" banner for my brother's 60th birthday. I wrote the text in my word processor and wanted to use CorelDraw 9 for the actual creation.

Unfortunately, CorelDraw kept crashing and when it died, it would corrupt the document. I did have backups, but even when I tried to save CD would crash. Everything seemed to cause a crash: changing a font, opening a docker, saving, adding a graphic. I finally gave up and worked on it in my desktop publisher/word processor (it'll be printed on my inkjet).

I copied the file to my laptop and tried working on it with CorelDraw 9 there. Same thing--crashes aplenty. It was unusable.

This rules out problems with my video card, mouse driver, RAM, or hard drive as the laptop is quite different. All I can think of is an offending font (though the font doesn't seem to be offending anything else) or a problem caused by a Windows update--not such an unusual thing to have happen.

Both computers are running Windows XP Home and both have 768 megs of RAM. CorelDraw 9 has always worked fine on both of them until today.

Has anyone else experienced problems with CD 9 lately?

I was ready to throw the computer out the window! Then I decided to see how I'd fare with Linux and I redid the document in Scribus, an up-and-coming high-level open source DTP program. This is the first thing I've worked on with Scribus and I was pleased. I have a LOT to learn, but it was reasonably easy to use and I'm learning where things are. Scribus can output to PDF, so I created a PDF and it looks good. I'm not quite done, but tomorrow I'll finish it up in Scribus.
--Judy M.

[Franca]

I'm sorry you had such a difficult time today! Draw 9 has been fine here on Win XP Pro, SP 2.

[ktinkel]

… CorelDraw kept crashing and when it died, it would corrupt the document. As you know, I know little about Windows, but if you worked on a Mac I would suspect corrupt Prefs file.

If deleting that didn’t solve the problem, I’d grit my teeth, uninstall the program and reinstall.

Not sure how much of that translates to your platform, however.

Interesting to hear about the Linux page layout program — will you give us a review when you know it better?

[Andrew B.]

Did all of these crashes involve a document that contained the text that originated in your word processor. And how did you move the text into your document. Paste? Paste-Special?

[JVegVT]

I haven't installed SP 2 yet. Will do it as soon as I have time to back up my whole system first. I doubt it will fix anything, though. I'm relieved to hear that SP 2 doesn't break CD 9.
--Judy M.

[JVegVT]

>> if you worked on a Mac I would suspect corrupt Prefs file. >>

That was my first thought, but it would be very unlikely that both of my CorelDraws (one on desktop, one on laptop) would get a corrupt Prefs file at the same time. I may start with the defaults anyway.

What I need to do is create a new document to see whether it's just something in this particular document or something in the program.

>> I’d grit my teeth, uninstall the program and reinstall. >>

My next step, if it happens with other documents.

>> Interesting to hear about the Linux page layout program — will you give us a review when you know it better? >>

Sure, but it will take me a while to learn it. I discovered today that my desktop computer dedicated mostly to Linux is too slow to run Scribus so it's usable (500 MHz, 192 megs of RAM that will go up to 288 when I get a stick of RAM from my daughter-in-law). Scribus runs fine on my 2 GHz laptop.

The down side of my transition to Linux is that I have so many new programs to learn. Oh well, I guess it keeps me young.<g>
--Judy M.

[JVegVT]

Did all of these crashes involve a document that contained the text that originated in your word processor. And how did you move the text into your document. Paste? Paste-Special?

Yes, I wrote the text in a word processor, copied the text to the clipboard as plain text, and pasted it into CorelDraw. There was no link or connection to the word processor.
--Judy M.

[Steve Rindsberg]

It's been quite a while since I used Draw9, but ISTR that it allowed customizable workspaces (press Ctrl+J and see if there's the option to save the workspace anywhere in the dialog box). They could be pretty flakey. Try switching to the default workspace or backing up then deleting your workspace files and restarting Draw.

In Draw11, workspaces are in \Documents and Settings\yourname\Application Data\Corel\Graphics11\User Workspace\CorelDRAW11

With just a little bit of thought, surely they could have made the path longer! Tsk.

[marlene]

I have CorelDraw 9, and if you want to send me the file, I'll try fiddling with it to see if it crashes here too.

mxh

[JVegVT]

Steve and Marlene,

Thanks for jumping in. I won't be in Windows for a couple of days. I'm almost done with a redo of the file in both OpenOffice.org and Scribus under Linux. I'm just learning these apps, so I'm trying them out to see what they can do.

The file isn't complicated at all and it's just a personal project for my brother. The only thing weird about it is the size (8-1/2 by 22).

I'll let you know what I find when I get back to Windows.
--Judy M.