I had an 11 mB worksheet that I saved in v12's dandy new format and one morning it just wouldn't open. I had about 20 hours work between the backup and the corrupted file. Mathsoft's answer was "send it to us and we'll try to edit out the offending html code". After a week of frustration of trying to get the big file to them I finally succeeded through a friend's FTP site. The had it a few weeks and said "it can't be fixed". In the interveneing weeks I had saved the backup in v11 format, removed v12 from all my machines, re-installed v11, and repeated the work that I'd lost.
That experience took me from bullish to bearish on MathCad. I even looked at Maple and Mathmatica, but they were just too pricy.
David