Paint Shop Pro :: Painting And Cloning Features

For many years, I used the Photo House program on Corel Print House Magic v.4 as my photo editor/image generator of choice. Considering it was a freebie with a printer, I found it to be a remarkably versatile program which really opened up my creativity. I'd tried Adobe Photo Shop, which I didn't find at all user-friendly, plus a few other programs - but I kept coming back to Photo House.

Anyway... it worked fine on every Windows version from 98 onwards. But it won't work on Windows 7. It'll load... but it crashes as soon as I try to do anything. Someone suggested changing the compatibility mode - but I'm running Home Premiun, which doesn't have that option. Currently I'm using Gimp, which is okay - kind of Photo Shop Lite - but it still won't do certain things that I used to do all the time on Photo House. So I'm now thinking of going for Paint Shop Pro as v. 4's now come out (I was told to avoid v. 3 because of some glitches).

What I'd like to know is whether the program incorporates those features I used lots on Photo House and haven't found since. They are:

1) The ability to open two photographs side by side and clone an image from one of them directly onto the other one. I used to do things like have a landscape and clone a figure onto it from the other photograph, which gave a much better effect than doing cut and paste. I'm presuming this sort of thing can be done using layers (never used them before) - but doing it the way I used to do it was very easy, and working with layers looks a lot more difficult.

2) The brushes and spray gun on Photo House had a huge choice of heads/shapes to choose from, with variable degrees of opacity. One such head was a star shape, which if used with the spray gun would give a stunning effect of a spray of stars of varying size and colour. I used that a lot in some children's illustrations I do. Gimp doesn't have that feature, and nothing else I've looked at seems to have, either.