This was why we couldn't have nice things

Anybody who's used Painter for any length of time will recognize this.

I love Painter. I've used it since version 2 (it's now at 12), and it's the most important important computer program I own. In fact, it's so important that I just wrote 'important' twice.

But for years, Painter had a bug that would frequently cause the program to crash, and almost always corrupt the piece you were working on. This is just one of dozens I lost. I assume I saved this one because there was enough of it left to salvage by tracing on a new layer. Most of the time, the image was completely lost. In some cases, the file couldn't be reopened at all.

A lot of users were terrified when Corel bought Painter from MetaCreations (there's a great story about that, too, and maybe I'll figure out a way to shoehorn it into the narrative someday), but for my money, they've done a pretty good job with it. Most significantly, they got rid of the bug that had been causing this for years.