Two Corel programs not working correctly

by FredS - 11/28/06 12:57 AM

Running Win98SE. I've been using my Corel Draw 11 and Photopaint 11 heavily lately for some work, and now they've seemingly become corrupted. First I noticed that I lost their Help files - an error message appears that says Help can't be found on Photopaint, and on Corel Draw nothing happens at all - Help doesn't react to clicks on its button.

More seriously, the Clone tool and Effect tool (same group - the Effect tool looks like Q-tip - on lower left side of toolbar) when selected, no longer have their controls appear at the top of the screen (size and transparency, for example) when selecting them. In fact, the Clone tool is now stuck on making a large, round, brown circle of color and not cloning anything (lifting part of a drawing and reproducing it elsewhere). Also, in Corel Draw, the eraser tool disappeared. I can't seem to make it reappear using any trick I know.

I deleted and reloaded both Corel Draw and Photopaint. Then I ran newly-updated Spybot and Lavasoft programs for malware. Some bugs showed up but since cleaning those the two graphic programs are still acting goofy. I plan to run a complete virus check tonight but all other programs are operating okay, so a virus might not be the cause.

The only thing I can say has changed is that my Norton Anti-virus program's automatic update expired in the past week. It seems that since then, Norton (which is still usable with its last updates) takes slightly longer to load. Maybe the change in Norton has now affected these two graphic programs?

Any ideas will be appreciated.