This was posted to the DraftSight Facebook page, and I thought it should be shared here as well:

"I've been using the free version of Draftsight at home (I have a pro licence on my work laptop) and I recently updated it to Draftsight 2015.

Ever since I did, Draftsight would crash on startup. It was very annoying as you can imagine. I uninstalled, cleaned the registry, removed anything that may have been left over from previous installs, but nothing would work. It still crashed on startup.

Eventually I came up with a plan. I went in to the properties of the Draftsight shortcut, the compatibility and ticked them all.

I ran Draftsight and it worked. Great news! One by one I went in and unticked the selections in compatibility mode and tried Draftsight each time.

Everytime it worked, every time till I unticked Run in 256 colors. Draftsight wouldn't start.

That seemed so suggest it was a graphics driver issue. I checked for an update, none was available (my home laptop is getting on in years). I wondered what to do... I went in to the graphics properties and changed from 32bit colour depth to 16 bit colour depth and just like that, Draftsight ran.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has faced such an issue, so hopefully someone out there will find this helpful!"