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I've used Paint Shop Pro for longer than I can remember, back when it was a product of JASC. I think I first acquired Paint Shop Pro 5 or 6. In my experience, the program has just kept getting worse with each edition since Corel took it over. Bloated, unstable, and slow, the degraded performance seems to be a tradeoff for some of the fancy features Corel has introduced - many of which I don't ever use. Frustrated with PSP Pro XI's clunky performance which seemed to get a little worse after I bought a Vista-equipped PC, I recently took the plunge and bought the "upgrade" to X2. Now I'm just about done with the whole PSP ride and looking around for an alternative photo editing program. (And please don't tell me to get more RAM; I've added RAM up to the limits of this six-month-old PC: 4GB.) First, it took a long time for X2 to install. Turns out the culprit is a little third party "licensing" program (psiservice.exe) that both X1 and X2 install on each customer's computer, that Corel doesn't inform us about, and that some people consider spyware. I found out about it on Wikipedia. Once I followed the Corel instructions on dealing with psiservice.exe, I got X2 installed. By the way, Corel did not explain what "psiservice.exe" is, or that it's a program installed by Corel's PSP, or give any option to uninstall psiservice.exe. X2 has turned out to be a laggard performer. It doesn't work any faster than X1, either when I start it up or when I'm opening a photo image to work on. Also, X2 has consistently hung up after about the third image I've worked on, so I've had to close and restart it. I've wasted my money. I bought it directly from Corel, and I assume there's no money back guarantee. I plan to try to get a refund, won't be surprised if I can't. This is a sad goodbye to a software brand name - Paint Shop Pro - that for at least a decade provided decent photo editing capability, at a reasonable price. I just hope that when I find a replacement for it, I can figure out how to uninstall its little third-party "licensing" program.