Your my man Steve!
I totally agree with what Fly is saying in his reference to Xara's really nil expansion and how much better AI is when your handling colour whither it is using swatches or live colour you can select, change and delete any instance of that colour or blending mode in one click. And from CS3 onwards AI does not take 3 months to start up or take hours to redraw when you change something in a complex drawing. Like Fly I do prefer still Xara but work and using certain tools in AI dictates the use of AI and its not the monster that some folk in this forum think it is. It just takes a bit more time to learn when you are a beginner than XPro 4 does and that steep learning curve puts some folk off using the programme.