The CorelDraw Graphics Suite combines three heavyweight graphics tools that can be used individually or worked together. Now in version 11, the CorelDraw Suite shows Corel still has plenty of ideas on how to improve the effectiveness and ease-of-use of these major applications.

For example, in CorelDraw there are now new "three-point" tools for drawing rectangles, ellipses and curves. With each, you click to fix the first point, stretch out to define an axis or baseline and click again to complete the object. The new Polyline tool enables you to create lines and objects segment by segment, where each segment can be straight or curved. The Pen tool offers a quick way to create Bezier curves.

CorelDraw 11 introduces symbols to its repertoire, too, so you can save and reuse drawing elements in a clip-board-style library. Using symbols saves considerable file space, particularly important when drawing Web graphics.

Corel PhotoPaint 11 is to bitmap editing what CorelDraw is to vector drawing. In many ways a competitor to Adobe Photoshop, the new version of PhotoPaint includes more improvements for Web artists. You can now slice images into a number of small parts to aid quick downloads and create rollovers for buttons and image maps, so they appear differently when pointed to or clicked. The program also supports JPEG 2000 files, so you can save your images in this new high-compression format.

The Cut-out masking tool helps extract foreground images from picture files and create objects from them that you can incorporate with other pictures. While not as comprehensive as Corel's own stand-alone KnockOut product, it's a useful tool in its own right. Red-eye removal from portrait photos can be a bugbear, but the new red-eye removal tool replaces red pixels with their greyscale equivalents.

Various other effects within PhotoPaint 11 add to its usefulness--things like enhanced lens flare, improved bevels and reworked image stitching for panoramic photos.

The third part of the suite is Corel RAVE, a Macromedia Flash animation creator. This module now uses a very similar interface to CorelDraw and incorporates most of the same tools. It also offers tools and effects specific to its animation role, such as tweening of text on a path and of the program's predefined library objects, Perfect Shapes.

I'm a Corel Draw user of long standing (got CD4 in 1996), but was finding that my existing CD7 would freeze every once in a while on WinME, so decided to upgrade. What a fiasco.

CD11 has a feature, seemingly a bit like Norton Antifreeze, that intercepts every time the application becomes unstable. Well it doesn't matter what I do, it becomes unstable. Again and again, it intercepts. Put "CorelDraw 11" and "unstable" into a search engine, and you find that it's clearly a feature of the product.