A similar story here but with the hardware end of the software/computer tale. As you say "plopped" down exactly $3999.99 for a perpetual license and skinned my knuckles for easily ten years coming up to speed with the interface. And what an interface it was/is; more than any user could ever master kind-of-thing PERIOD. Come time for perpetual license idea scrapped by the company, ackompanying the idiomatic $4000.00/year subscription, subscribing to a new-fangled interface also chocked with more features on top of the last more features (this company has always been an industry big name and has been in the game since software and personal computers were born) ... became a non-sequiter but I had my 64-bit version, even though it ran slow on 16GB of memory. Gungho still and undetered from no more updates/upgrades, computer evolution goes on, etc. Come limitless amount of memory on a new computer (~ year 15) and reinstallation of the application and 6 months of dicking around without thee driver selectively excluded by me upon start up in order to get the thing to show me the interface (without the ability to "color" anything ) ... I was ready to toss in the towel. Now for the hardware part: one day ... as I was waltzing down dingly dell way (tromping through my BIOS with size 14 Sorels on snowshoes and only an umbrella in lieu of a 70lb pack, perhaps because I'd danced through here before and knew better, perhaps not) ... I happened upon the CPU Core Count/Hyperthread limiting ticker. For some reason I spun down the core count to 11 from 32 (approximation; because I don't dick with it anymore since I "fixed" it ... and to make this story less long-winded). Waking back up after a repower on ... I was only looking to see if my box had altered any behaviors, right? And I don't remember why I would have dumped that driver which caused the interface to the app to crash upon load back into the active load folder but I did ... and the app didn't crash! And I now had "color" and could use the full $3999.99 perpetual licensed ball-of-wax. Once in a while the interface crashes and even though it's over twenty years old the app still messages me that I can send the crash dump to the developers now. And there's even the comment box that the devs will read; the one where I tell them ... what I really think of this whole subscription idea.