PhotoImpact fails to load or create a new image after first launch

I've been testing the commercial (legacy) Ulead PhotoImpact 12, a graphics suite, for years on ReactOS. (Has been bought and then abandoned by Corel.)

For my software tests for 0.4.15-RC5 (that is for the release of 0.4.15) I noticed following severe regression over 0.4.14 and 0.4.15-dev-4414. This regression still persists in the current 0.4.16-dev-2300 build tested today.

See below: Error might have existed before 0.4.15-dev-4414 already, but another bug prevented me from ever experiencing it. Now that PI12 does not crash ROS any more when closing I can open it a second time and experience following issue:

The application reproducibly throws following error when trying to create a new image or trying to load an image from the disk, even for small JPG images. Does not happen during first start of application.

The issue still exists in the current 0.4.16-dev-2300 build tested today. With this I created the attached app crash log: PhotoImpact12_Appcrash_2026-02-21_23-14-37.txt.

I hope this helps to identify the cause.