How to fix Painter's "This installation of Painter has been damaged or illegally modified" Error For Mac and PC

Whew! That's a long title, but it's definitely worth it! Corel has a bad history of unstable programs and bad customer support. And I don't see it changing anytime soon. As a Mac user, I don't use much of their program. Except Painter. And today, out of the blue, it decided to crap out on me. Yep. I got one of those:

This installation of Painter has been damaged or illegally modified.

To the untrained eye, this might seem that I have either done something stupid and delete a file, or may have pirated (*Gasp!*) the software. Well, whoopde-fuckin-do. You know what? Corel treat people with both disorder the same way: With a cold shoulder.

After trying multiple time to install and uninstalling the damn thing, I scoured the internet. One guy/gal in a forum posted that s/he has fixed his/her copy by downloading a crack(!!) off of a hacking site. Well, that's a solution, Corel! You should distribute cracks to fix your brokkin software! But that solution is neither elegant, nor Mac-worthy.

The thing about a Mac, is we're outnumbered by the dumb people who choose to deal with viruses and all those windows crap instead of switching to a beautifully designed hardware with a revolutionary and well thought-out OS X. But enough about you PC users.

To fix the problem on a Mac, you don't need to install or uninstall or do anything, just go to your HD > Library > Preferences folder and delete the file named nTitles Product Licenses IV.

Then just load Painter! You will have to re-register so I hope you haven't thrown out your hard copy. *grin*

Now, on a PC, we have to delve a little deeper into the horrid entanglement that is the Windows Registry! *Dun-Dun-Dunnnn*

Oh, yes, this baby may look tame now, but watch out! Y'all artsy-artsy people are in for an ascii headache.

The rest of this solution is basically lifted from here. I got rid of my Windows headache so I won't have to deal with this registry shit anymore. Did I say shit? I meant crap.

you have to delete the Protexis files afterinstallation, but before trying to open the program.

So after uninstalling and then reinstalling Painter, do START>>RUN>>typeREGEDIT Search for all PROTEXIS files [two of them] and DELETE (being careful that's all you delete - remember to backup the reg first just in case). And only then open the program. 

Also, the one reply to that blog post was;

hey, the nudes were weird but I liked the other stuff you can draw

Ah, PC, how will we Macs live without you?