The salesperson was absolutely right, I took it home and immediately began fixing minor issues (scratches) with photos. After some tinkering and reading I was fixing more complicated problems, removing an errant finger in front of the lens, fixing pant legs and shoes covered up by said finger, etc. Later I discovered that I could make flyers for friend's and family -- I particularly remember one for my cousin's Christmas pageant, the school had copies made and hung around school building and sent home with her classmates. The following year another cousin was graduating from High School and said he had forgotten to get announcements. Looking back on it, they probably didn't have the money to spend on announcements. I remembered some years earlier I had a Tandy Computer that had Deskmate software on it. Among Deskmate's utilities was one that allowed you to make a card from a piece of paper. I recalled that it would show four panels on the screen and that you and you'd draw or write text (perhaps the were labelled front/back etc., IDK) I recalled that when printing some of the stuff you drew or wrote would come out upside down so that when folded in the paper in four, you'd have a "card". Well, with PSP and a couple of practice sheets of paper later, we had the concept down. My mom had pulled out several old graduation announcements from her collection and my cousin's girlfriend went to buy some paper that had similar texture and color and some perforated business card paper with a similar color. I scanned in the logo for his High School using one from Mom's collection, removed some unnecessary bits, pretty much copied the text of the thing, changing the year, date and time of course. A couple of test-prints and revisions, we had our announcements. They came out beautifully. We printed his name in the center of the business card and placed inside of the folded announcements. Sure, we didn't have embossed text or anything fancy, but they really did look nice. I recall all of us, my mom, my cousin, Heather (my cousin's girlfriend) and I sitting around the table folding the things, rejecting a few because of imperfections in paper, etc. $59 for a relatively simple tool that brought all those happy memories and great photos along with. I say it was money well spent.
As the years went by, I did purchase version 8 at upgrade pricing, I found it to be a bit more bloated, but it did add some cool features and the bloat was nothing too serious. I remember hearing about Corel taking it over from Jasc. I decided to download a trial version of X (version 10). I could see then that it was over. It had useless utilities piled on it, bloated beyond belief, and being taken in the direction of a bunch of quick-fix tools for photos from your digital camera. I strongly suspected that they real talent from Jasc was gone or going to be gone quickly.
Recently, I reinstalled version 8 to fix a couple of photos my Aunt had gotten from another family member, I got curious and decided to see if anyone else felt they same way I did. Sure enough:
http://improvepsp.blogspot.com/
Having not looked back since the trial version of X, I find Mr. Prodanov's entry 'Part 6: Rest in Peace, Paint Shop Pro" revealing:
PSP now installs more junk services than ever, without even asking you of course. Virtual memory including background processes like MediaCataloger.exe, metadatamgr.exe, psiservice.exe, CorelPhotoDownloader.exe and standby.exe is 618 mb. And of course, PSIservice, Standby and Metadatamgr don't go away when you close PSP. They need to look after you, and check the sodium content of your food I guess.
His suggestion for the splash screen is dead on. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.