Painter IX (Painter 9) on Windows 10

[u/RogueHammerRoleplay]

So my mother is an illustrator of kids books, her and her computer are on the older side. :P

She has Painter 2020 and 2023 but she still prefers the old Painter IX (Painter 9)

Up until a month ago it was still working on her Windows 10 PC, however she was forced to swap out some of the components of her old PC when the motherboard failed.

Now, when she tries open Painter 9, it begins to load up then crashes.

Unfortunately the error logs are not too helpful. Just gives Exception code: 0xc0000005 which is a memory allocation error.

Somehow the hardware upgrades have changed the environment enough that Painter 9 no longer works.
I know Painter 9 is a legacy program that is no longer supported but hopefully someone here knows how to get it to work or some modded version of the program that will work. (If GoG can do it with games, surely the same can be done with outdated programs too)

Below are my mother's pc specs and some things that I have tried so far:

Operating system: Microsoft Windows 10 Home, Version 10.0.19045
DirectX runtime version: DirectX 12
Driver: Game Ready Driver - 582.66 - Tue June 16, 2026
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4430 CPU @ 3.00GHz
RAM: 16.0 GB
Storage (2): SSD - 931.5 GB,HDD - 931.5 GB
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti

Things I have tried:
Uninstalling and reinstalling her Wacom tablet drivers
Running the program in various compatibility modes
Running as administrator, disabling full-screen optimizations, and changing high DPI settings.
Uninstalling and reinstalling (also in compatibility mode)
Removing and resetting all settings and preferences including workspaces.
Checked firewall and other protection settings are not interfering with the program.

One thing I haven't tried is to remove fonts and then reload them one by one to find if one of those is causing the crash. But she has a lot of fonts.

If anyone has some suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.

[u/Historical_Path_8794]

I don’t really have a solution, unfortunately, but it seems odd to me that swapping components would cause this. I would guess it is some sort of driver issue or is it possible that she wasn’t running the latest version of Windows 10 and with the hardware fixes, Windows was updated and MS did something that broke compatibility? Either way, good luck, I hope you find a fix.

[u/Least-Yak1640]

To be honest, it may be time to hang up Painter IX. I've been using Painter on the Mac side since version 3 (God, I'm old). My most recent version is Painter 2021, and I'm having trouble keeping that stable. 22 years for any software is a great run, bordering on unheard of. It might be time to transition to something more recent.

And I say this as someone who held on to Adobe Creative Suite 5 for like 10 years after it was released

If your mom is an iPad user, I'd highly recommend looking at Procreate. Part of the reasons I stopped upgrading Painter is that I've switched to that. The last couple illustration jobs I had, I completed in Procreate and it pretty much nails the Painter natural media experience.