Hello there!
I'm kinda new here, but today, after struggling for hours to resolve the issue, i've encountered a problem. I checked for it via google but couldn't find any reasons or answers to my problem. For the ones i thought they were, clearly they weren't what i was looking for. So, i decided to share this with you guys. I'll try to explain details too, just in case some guy from the Corel Draw team sees it and may want to resolve the issue with a patch or explain the reason beneath this. (As much as i know, i am not the only victim of this.)
The thing is, i was to install Corel Draw X4 Trial to a friend of mine, since he's an X3 user i thought he may convert to X4 after trying it. But well.. how would i know that he wasn't even going to see it! I've brought the installer to my friend with me, with plans of installing. I went there, installed it and after everything was completed tried running X4 in order to check it. Everything is OK till now but... what welcomed us was C.A.R.M. instead of Corel Draw GUI!
Corel Application Recovery Wizard was constantly running when i wanted to start Corel Draw. I thought maybe my installer was corrupt. So i downloaded two different copies, one from Corel. It took a while, meanwhile i was trying to repair or remove or modify options with the installer i had.Several times i've uninstalled Draw, several times i've installed from scratch or modified the installation also cleaned the leftovers, but it was of no use! When the downloads were complete, i re-run all these stages with the same result at every time. I was exhausted, i was thinking if something was wrong with the windows or with the hardware. Thinking all these, i've installed Corel to 3 different machines. One with an XP installation with only SP2, nothing else. One with XP + SP2 + All the updates till today and one with XP + SP2 + All updates + All the runtimes i could gather. No need to mention these machines didn't have anti-viral software. It was still no use. Corel A.R.M was still there and i was still unable to see even a glance of what X4 looked like.
Googling for a while a stumbled upon "Dependency Walker" so i got it; which turned out to be a software i was longing for and thanks for the guy who pointed that out, and saw that my Corel was seeking for efsadu.dll dwmapi.dll mobsync.dll at my \windows\system32 folder and i didn't have them. Confused, i've downloaded all them; you can find them easily with one google query, placed them on correct locations, checked again via dependency walker to confirm their presence at right path and then re-tried running Draw. "Damn" i said to myself, a dead end again.
Then i've tried running Corel whilst i was pressing F8 key, answered the question asking me if i want to turn back to factory settings, yes. And then again at the exact point of loading process, whilst "Creating Application Environment" Corel crashes yet again!
Bored and pissed, i stumbled upon a "Portable" version of Corel Draw (Sorry Corel Guys!) and wondered if that pre-installed one would work on my pc. After downloading i watched Corel Draw loading without problems, miracily. I was then sure my computer was working OK!. Then i removed efsadu.dll dwmapi.dll mobsync.dll in order to see if it still would work, and it was working.
Checking for the differences i could find; i didn't have any hopes on it since that portable one came as an exe which i couldn't extract in anyway, and had few files left out, the i realized something. The size of Corel folder in my %appdata% folder was significantly different than the one in the portable software i had. I started checking out for differences and instantly saw that many things were missing from my data. Adding files, running corel draw, removing file... Using this loop was of no use. I've even re-added the dll files i've already removed but.. Then at the last folder i saw that my DRAWUIConfig.xml was a bit smaller than the other one.. whilst my DRAWUIConfig.xml was only 182 bytes, the one in other folder was 113 kilobytes.
Wow, it wasn't surprising that i couldn't see the GUI of Corel Draw, the one i had didn't have even one!
I replaced the DRAWUIConfig.xml i had with the one i downloaded and now it is working OK! You can find the links to those copies below, i've tried with with other machine that i've run into the same problem and it worked OK.
But there are some questions to be answered.
1- Why is X4 calling out for these .DLL files even though it works without them, especially what the heck is X4 doing with a Vista file DLL? (dwmapi.dll, i believe i got it with Internet Explorer 7)
2- What could be the reason for this? I've installed it to machines with just installed, containing no software windows as well as a normal users but it still was the same. Why doesn't my Corel generate the rest of this XML file and giving me hours of pain in the ***?
3- If it helps, the Windows i have is Turkish, I have IE7 and a working Media Player as well as a modified windows (by me, so i know that it has nothing to do with it) which has and .NET, All Microsoft and Non-microsoft runtimes, meaning nearly all the required files meaning if these DLL's were part of a runtime, i would have had it.
Anyway, this is the end of my story, i hope it helps to at least someone in my situation!
Bye,
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This link is a copy of my original DRAWUIConfig.xml : http://az.cokh.net/corel/DRAWUIConfig.original.xml
This link is a copy of the proper, working DRAWUIConfig.xml : http://az.cokh.net/corel/DRAWUIConfig.working.xml
(I've also uploaded a copy of the working Corel Draw application data folder here: http://az.cokh.net/corel/CorelDraw-X4-Working-preset.rar )
How to copy?
Click on windows icon, select run and run below in order to get to the directory
%appdata%\Corel\CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4\User Workspace\CorelDRAW\_default
(appdata as a link works and by default it points to the current users, yours, documents and settings\application data folder.)
M. Omer Golgeli
Not a designer, nor an artist. Just an IT guy.
Istanbul/TURKEY