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I have been using Paintshop Pro for years, and finally bought this version naively thinking it would be nice to update the version I have had for the last 5 years or more. But whatever merits this once-delightful program may have are moot given Corel's brazen and despicable practice of using it as a vector for unwanted advertising popups. You cannot even close the unwanted ad, it immediately pops up again, over and over, unless you kill the underlying PaintShop process in Task Manager. No matter how many times you've been forced to view the exact same ad, the program continues to display it ad-infinitum every time you close it. Just in case this isn't insulting enough, the ad I'm currently seeing actually advertises the same product I already own. An option under Help called Message Preferences that looks like it might let you turn the ads off has no apparent effect. Conveniently, they wait until the warranty support period has ended to unleash this hell on their paying customers, denying you the ability to complain to them about it. I guess they don't want to see the same message over and over and over and over! UPDATE 2014-12-13 Just want to add that it turns out there is a way to defeat the popups, although you have to hack the program a bit to do it. You can just search for "How to Disable Messages in PaintShop Pro" and you will find the instructions. They work like a charm. Some other guides suggest that in order to keep the unwanted "Messages" folder deleted, you should create an empty text file in its place named Messages (with no .txt extension.) I did so, but I don't know if this is strictly necessary. To address some of the comments below: 1. I understand how the ads are supposed to work - you are supposed to get one popup ad (typically for a Corel product, but this is surely not any binding obligation on their part) when closing the program, if Corel has pushed one out to you. If you check the box to not see it again, you're supposed to not see that exact ad again (but may well be served a different one next time.) The behavior I was getting was clearly a bug in the program, causing it to spew the same ad over and over again, blocking the program from closing fully. The moral of the story should be, if you're going to force ads upon your customers, you'd better get it right, or face wrathful reviews like this one. 2. To those who point out that hey, ads are everywhere these days, what's the big deal, I would point out that companies will take any advantage that their customers will tolerate. Being resigned to it only guarantees it will continue. And there is already a class of software supported by advertising - this is called, appropriately enough, "adware." Adware should be, and usually is, labeled as such. And until the recent annoying trend to the contrary, adware was always an opt-in concept: you can be hit with ads, or you can buy the program. I bought the program.