PaintShop Pro is our preferred image editor, we’ve been familiar with it long before its acquisition by Corel. Back then it was Jasc PaintShop Pro. For the most part, its core functions – which we frequently use – have remained consistent over the years. Our only complaint is that recent releases have suffered miserably slow startups. Absolutely abysmal.
We go to the trouble of purchasing powerful machines, CPUs with grunt and low latency RAM in excess, yet the software struggles to load. We’d accept a 5-10 second wait, but it turns out we have time to open the browser, check our email and read the news headlines before PaintShop Pro begins showing signs of life. Verging on rage, we went looking for an answer.
It appeared we weren’t alone in our frustration going by the top Google search results. However, most of the requests for help on message boards went unanswered. Although there was a lone YouTube link that promised a fix.
It worked for us.
Essentially, it involves editing the “hosts” file at:
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
The “hosts” file has no extension and can be edited with Notepad to include the following lines (to the bottom):
127.0.0.1 corel.com 127.0.0.1 ipm.corel.com 127.0.0.1 www.corelstore.com 127.0.0.1 content.corel.com
Since the hosts file resides in the system area, some antivirus software prevents modification. So they might need deactivation for duration of the edit.
For some reason, that worked. 👍
If we had to guess, it seems PaintShop Pro is programmed to query those addresses on startup, possibly to retrieve promotional material from Corel. This would not be an issue if it were a background activity, but giving it the utmost priority upon software startup, while severely undermining performance, is … 🙄.
In this instance, it appears our internet connection is what slows us down. Corel probably assumes the internet operates equally fast – everywhere. It doesn’t.