Brush corruption after crash

I am new to the forum. I hope this is the right place as it seems somewhat in between. I am using Xara Xtreme more and more for professional work, so this is very important. While working on a piece, my system started bogging down (older system - happens regularly and I reboot and things work better). This time I closed - what is becoming a very complex file (It is / will look look like something painted in photoshop or painter - high degree of realism with a female figure and a detailed wolf - detailed fur) and Xara froze. Once I forced closed it and rebooted, I opened the file to find all my natural media strokes corrupted - turned into standard lines. Fortunately I save back up files as I go just in case. I still lost 30 minutes worth of time redoing some of the strokes.

I am still new to Xara. Until now it seemed virtually limitless in what I could do with it (I use version 2). As the fur (on the wolf) got more detailed, as well as the rest of the illustration (which is only about 55% done) Xara has been redrawing layers more slowly when I toggle them on and off.

Is there a limit to how much I can expect to do with Xara? I know from testing Illustrator, I could not get as far, doing such an illustration, on my system (HP pavillion DV5000 AMD64 with 1.5 gig onboard shared ATI vid, win XP). Will .5gig more ram help?
Any feedback, or advice appreciated.

yes - everything has its limits

how many brushes are you using? - its best with complex work to set xtreme so that only those you need are loaded and restrict these to two or three at a time

also are you using live effects?
if not, disable these before you start
if you are its an added overhead and again only those you need should be loaded

is it absolutely necessary for the finished work to be vector, if not there are workarounds you can try - essentially flattening the work as you go along

is it for print or screen?

sometimes when xtreme appears to freeze it is simply working and not refreshing the screen - it can take a long time to do some operations

not sure extra RAM would help, but it might

Welcome to the forum

Hello, uberzilla, and welcome to the forum :)

Sorry, you ran into trouble. Handrawn has given you good advice.

You may also want to download Soquili's excellent utility, XaReg, and use it to tell Xtreme to make backups. http://www.xaraxone.com/html/xareg.html

BTW, if you do, Xtreme will make a separate backup each time you save.

Allison