i recently upgraded to Designer 3 (Pro) and these text carves that ran in about 40 minutes on the prior release now take 1 hour and 24 minutes AND the text carvings are not nearly as clean. I watched the carving head and it puts dots down before it actually carves the letter, it carves part of the letter which looks reasonably good, then goes back and lays down more dots, screwing up the smoothness of what it had already carved. I'm making a plaque using text with a TTF font and centerline carving. I went back to my old version of designer, rebuilt the pattern since the new version was not able to be used by the old version, and it runs in less than 1/2 of the time and is much cleaner. It does not go back over the ketters already carved, messing them up. Any idea what could be going on with designer Pro? I'm not happy about spending that kind of money for an upgrade that performs this badly!! Any help or ideas would be appreciated.