and i lost an image that i worked hard at. anyone here know how to get it back? i have saveing autoactically

 If you start Corel again, press F8 while the program starts. If you have luck, you're asked to open an automatic backup file of the image. Sometimes it works.

i found it. it was in a TEMP under MY DOCUMENT. i couldn't find it again, no doubt, thanks, mo

For all creations you would never want to have to do over again from scratch, best practice is to save incremental versions... eg: <filename>, <filename>1, <filename>2  or some such system you find meaningful.  And store your critical files offsite as backups... eg: on a cd or memory stick, portable hard drive on your person, in your vehicle, on X drive... or somesuch. You'll never be sorry you had a good backup system in place if disaster strikes in some form... hard drive failures, fire, flood... pick your favourite disaster. I work in two different locations entirely, so always have all my work on the original hard drive the work was done on and another hard drive in the 2nd location. A memory stick makes it easy to transfer the files... from Town Office or from Home Office.

Sometimes is happen. I don't know for what reason. Whatever the problems seems to be a bug in Corel Photo Paint. Just be sure you're using automatically back-up and don't forget to save frequently :)