xara did this because they consider the majority of their users use photgraphs which they do not want distorted and would rather have cropped - that is my understanding anyway[/QUOTE]

I've posted about this before. I understand there are workarounds, my problem is that I always forget what the best approach is and end up having to try holding down alt or unclicking smart transformation,or holding down other keys and clicking or unclicking other settings and these work SOMETIMES but not always. My problem is that I never remember what to hold/click, I'm never sure what to unclick or hold down and these solutions don't always work for me so I end up having to spend time trying different solutions and being frustrating when it seems to me that the old procedures worked every time and were a ton more intuitive. Before, When I wanted to crop an image I simply draw a rectangle to the desired size and slice it from the original image, that seems to be an easy approach that requires no more clicks than what Xara now recommends. I usually don't want my images distorted but a little change in the format doesn't present a problem BUT essentially deleting part of my image isn't acceptable for my work. I just think the old way was better and easier.