@tvtech
Your point is valid about freeware. Farnell/Newark/Element14 is in the business to make money, which is necessary to stay in business. The problem I see with staying with version 5.xx or below is that as OS's change, those versions may not remain be compatible with the newest OS's. That has happened to me more than once with good programs that were not continued (Pagis Pro comes to mind as an example). From my perspective, I had a purchased version and the update was quite inexpensive. I opted to update rather than risk having to buy a wholly new version as Win8 or later takes over and XP becomes more dated. Of course, there is no guarantee that the total cost of the updates will be less than the cost of a new version when such incompatibilities arise.
John