Corel Paint Shop Pro XI announced

[seekerdude]

Thanks for the welcome and the reply.

Actually, Task Mgr reports 50% usage on my machine.... a P4 2.8Ghz Dell with 1 gig of ram and a high power video card (can't remember which one). It is seemingly reverse, as you say. While sitting idle in the task bar, task mgr reports 50% usage for this process, but while in use, usage is normal. And this 50% usage is definitely impacting my machine for other tasks as it runs sluggish under these conditions. Corel knows no more about it than they have reported concerning the slowness of the database loading.... which does not seem to be the issue here. I described the problem exactly over the course of 3 emails with their support dept and all I got was essentially 'we don't know anything more and we're working on it.' I have some doubt they really understood me based on the lack of a decent reply from them.

[Kraellin]

seeker,

hehe, tech support e-mail is notorious for being somewhat ambiguous. but i'll bet we see a patch for xi in not too long a time. i'm sure they're aware of it.

and no, it's not the database thing, unless they forgot to turn the updater for it off. mine was quite a remarkable change from when it first started doing the database update to when it finished. i couldnt even use psp when it first started. it wasnt until it was done that it returned to 'normal'. seems normal may not be normal now, though.

just nag them once in a while about this issue. i'm sure they'll find and fix it. they actually are pretty good at fixing the main bugs.

craig

[westguard]

CPU Issue Resolved

Hi everyone. I've had the CPU issue with Paint Shop Pro since it came on the market. Today, I finally found out what was causing it.

If you have short cuts in your Start Menu to drives, it appears that Paint Shop Pro is getting itself into an infinate loop by finding your drive first, then finding the start menu, then finding the drive again, etc etc.

This is clearly a bug, but as a work around try removing short cuts to your drives from your Start Menu and then restart Paint Shop Pro XI.

This problem also affects other gallery type software, such as that included with some Hewlett Packard printers (in fact this is how I stumbled across this).

I've written to Corel about this, and have done in the past (they replied with a blank look on their faces!).

I know this thread is a bit old but it pops up in Google so I hope this helps some people.

Kindest regards

Mark

[Kraellin]

westguard, welcome to RP.

and thank you for posting this. however, i'm a little confused. do you mean your windows start menu? that's the only start menu i know of and i dont know why anyone would put their drives in their start menu. nor would i think psp would need to look at your start menu. so, i'm a little confused here. are you, perhaps, talking about the browser menu within psp?

[westguard]

Hi Craig

Yes indeed I do mean the Windows Start menu. Let me give you an example of how this is found in a file structure, I'll run through each directory as PSP would find them in turn and you will see how the loop occurs:

c:\
c:\documents and settings
c:\documents and settings
c:\documents and settings\mark
c:\documents and settings\mark\start menu
c:\documents and settings\mark\start menu\drives
c:\documents and settings\mark\start menu\drives\c
c:\documents and settings\mark\start menu\drives\c\documents and settings
etc etc

I agree most people don't have short cuts to drives in their Start Menu, but Vista in particular offers the option to show drives on the start menu. When I removed this shortcut (it is just a shortcut to 'My Computer') Paint Shop Pro no longer sat there consuming 50% of CPU usage. There may well be short cuts elsewhere causing this problem?

The problem is that it appears PSP is 'spidering' short cuts, and if these short cuts link back to directories before the short cut itself, the short cut is found again and a loop occurs.

Thinking about it, this means it might not just be the Start Menu causing this, but this is one place that sometimes people will add a shortcut to a drive. I haven't tested it with short cuts on the desktop to drives, but this may well cause the same problem.

I have both Vista Ultimate and XP Pro, and both experienced this problem.

The other solution would be to exclude the Start Menu and any other directories containing shortcuts to paths that might cause a loop from the organizer. File --> Preferences --> General Program Preferences --> Organizer

I might be completely wrong here(!), but it has at least solved the problem for me!

On my XP machine I just excluded C: and that resolved the problem too.

Mark

[Kraellin]

fascinating. then why wouldnt this loop occur by having 'my computer' in your start menu, which, basically, everyone does, at least in the initial install of windows? i mean, i have 'my computer' in my start menu and psp isnt looping on me, at least that i can tell. and i'm not getting that high cpu usage you're reporting. and trust me, i believe you when you say it is on yours; i'm just trying to understand why here.

i dont know what 'spidering' is, but i do know what a loop is and this seems very odd behavior. perhaps another work-around would be to simply remove various unnecessary drives out of your browse menu in psp?

at any rate, good find.

[westguard]

I think the reason My Computer doesn't cause the problem, is because it isn't a shortcut. Try right clicking on My Computer from your start menu and select 'Properties', you'll see no path information pops up, just the usual computer configuration options. My Computer does not expand either, it just opens up explorer.

However when you add drives in Vista on the Start Menu, it expands to a sub level containing short cuts to drives.

[Kraellin]

ah, ok. interesting to know.

[wick2]

Found this thread by searching Google for "paint shop pro cpu usage". I'm running PSP XI (v11.20) & have the same ~50% CPU usage problem when the system is idle.

Just wanted to say that westguard appears to be right. I had created directory shortcuts under My Documents that I imagine caused the same type of recursion. The way I "fixed" it was to go into Preferences for Organizer & exclude the folder with my shortcuts. Later, since I never use Organizer & am rather disgusted by this bug, I decided to exclude my entire C drive. Now PSP boots up quick & the PSP CPU usage is 0% when idle. Thanks westguard!