After installing PaintShop Photo Pro X3 upon first start, it's already 1 hour showing it's hour glass

Question

I just installed Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 on my Windows 7 machine.

I started the program about an hour ago, and it's still showing it's hour glass cursor (althought the program started just fine).

Nothing visible is happening, except the memory I see increasing in the task manager.

I suspect the program to build a list of all images on my machine (which is a development pc and contains tens of thousands images as test environment for a local version of an online ecommerse website).

Can anyone confirm this to be the case ? Is the program building a list of photos on my disk ?

I find it strange that nothing visible is changing - e.g. a folder which is updated, a counter being incremented ...

Answer 1

PaintShop Pro is a classic example of bloat that seems to happen when a small company (Jasc) is taken over by a large one (Corel). Traditional wisdom is that PSP X (v10) was the last "good" version of the package and this version was basically a bug fix and slight user interface refresh of the venerable PSP v9.

Be aware that PSP X3 installs a raft of potentially unwanted additional "services" as documented on this web page:

http://www.sandon.it/?q=node/53

NOTE: since that page was written, Corel have released SP2 which I understand reduces the amount of baggage installed.

But yes, PSP X3 does have background service that creates thumbnails of images in the folders listed in the browser window. I even seem to recall that these got put in the roaming part of my profile which made my log off/on time horrendous! It always used to create thumbnails but only when you looked in a folder and then it just created a local hidden thumbnail file in that folder. Not a big nasty service.

That's not to say that it's a really bad program and Corel does seem to be making the right noises as mentioned in this blog:

http://improvepsp.blogspot.com/

But do be aware that it's not that lovely standalone, quick package it used to be.

Cheers, Rob.

Answer 2

to get more of an insight in what the program is doing, download the Sysinternals Suite, and use handle.exe or ProcessExplorer from the suite to see what files are being opened by PaintShop.

If it's indeed scanning your entire pc you should be able to see that: the handles will change all the time and list different directories with files/images.