Until today, I always believed that if you uninstall a program, reboot, and then re-install, it would be like starting with a fresh new installation.  I've now encountered a situation that makes me question that.  

Here's the story.  Corel Draw 8.0 was repeatedly CRASHING on my PC, USUALLY during routine tasks like doing a "Save As" or searching for an existing drawing in a directory.  It had run fine on the same machine for a couple of years.  After ruling out conflicts with other software and checking several ways for viruses and spyware, I figured that a file must have become corrupted, so I decided to do an uninstall-reinstall.

I used the uninstall program from the Corel program group.  After that, I ran two registry cleaners (Norton, and a freeware one).  I then rebooted and did a reinstall.  It prompted me for the registration key, which I had, and it appeared that things were going as I'd have expected.

However, after I opened the program, I immediately NOTICED that the "history" list -- in other words, the list of files that I had opened most recently -- was completely up to date.  If it was a fresh install, how did it know what I had been WORKING on before?  In addition, it was already set up to save files to a directory on a different drive.  How did it know to do that, since I don't save my Corel data files in the default location?

And of course, there's still the problem of crashing.  The uninstall-reinstall didn't APPEAR to solve it, although I need to do more testing to see if it has improved any.

My main concern isn't the crashing -- if I work at it long enough, I'm sure I'll find a solution to that.  But what am I overlooking as far as getting a nice clean re-installation?  If I wipe out the program and reinstall it, how does it "know" that it had been there before?  I find it hard to believe that it's getting any information from the saved data files, which are on a different drive.

Background info:  Windows XP Home.  Sony PC, 2.8 gHz, 512 meg RAM, lots of hard disk space.   No patches for my version on the Corel website.  Hard drives thorougly checked for viruses and spyware.  No problem with crashes in any other programs.   And yes, I know that Corel 8.0 is an older version, but it meets all my needs (and in fact, it can do way more than I'll ever be able to use it for), so I don't feel a great need to upgrade.  

Any thoughts?  Thanks in advance!I don't know about Corel, but Firefox & Thunderbird does the same thing.  If you do an uninstall/reboot/reinstall, all your 'stuff' is still there.   Come to find out that these programs store some data in MORE THAN ONE PLACE.  I found this out after doing a 'search' thru Explorer.  Maybe Corel does the same thing.  You might try doing an Explorer search and see what you get.

Hope this ads some insight  

Alan <><  every program that i know of does just go yo m ycomputer your harddrive (most commonly called c drive) program files and look for the program folder and detelete it..

make sure you uninstalled the program first.

after you deltete the folder(s) reboot and reinstall


and see if that did the trick


the problem could be caused by a corrupt file your tring to load also..



unlovedwarrior