I've used CorelDRAW from v3 through to v12, an expensive exercise, and I have to say it was anything but plain sailing! I stopped at v12 because I got tired of upgrading for little benefit or new 'killer' features that turned out to be bloat that was dropped in the next version only to be replaced with more. The integration between CorelDRAW and it's bitmap editor PhotoPAINT was poor because they remained separate applications, and there were never any of the clever features and tight integration we see in Xara WDP11 today. And certainly no website design! Corel's biggest draw (sorry) for me was the ability to import and export a huge list of graphics and vector (CAD) formats, but having said that, most of it was very buggy or only for years' old versions, never the latest, and the tech support to fix those problems was really non-existent, you just had to work around them. Believe it or not, later versions of CorelDRAW will just crash in a heap if you try to open older versions of their own .cdr file format, only a few versions old, and the only way I found to do this was to keep versions 4, 8, 10 and 12 installed - which was possible up to Win XP, but not later. So it got very messy and too much of a burden ultimately.

Years and years ago I purchased an early version of Xara 3d and I was fascinated to find out about their historical links with the Corel brand - it makes a good read. Anyway I upgraded Xara 3d over the years, mainly for making animated and 3d web graphics for Frontpage (which went the way of the dinosaurs). Then last year when I was looking for a new, affordable web design program I came across Xara again, and you know what?, when I keyed in my old username and password I was still in their database with all the versions I'd bought listed there. I was highly impressed that I had not been dumped like so many other software vendors do when you miss an upgrade or two. I bought v10 of Xara Web Design and Photo & Graphic Designer and upgraded this year to v11 of XDP. It is great value, the forums are friendly, and from what I've seen, if you have found a repeatable problem you will get the support you need.

It's unfortunate that you've experienced such trouble, and I feel your aggravation. We all do things with our PCs our own way and suffer consequences when we do something the programmers didn't anticipate, so don't be too hard on them, it takes two to tango. There are lots of users with many versions of Windows and yet I haven't seen a landslide of complaints like yours on these forums (or is that fora?). I started on win 8.0, allowed the upgrade to 8.1 and then 10 and rolled back to 8.1 because I didn't like 10, all without any Xara lockout issues. When I upgraded from the Xara v10 app's I put them on another PC running Win 8.0 without issues. I get a good feeling using Xara XDP11 and I wish I had made the jump away from CorelDRAW years ago. I think Xara have done some very clever and original stuff and deserve our support.