Make transparent crashes program

Years ago this software worked great for taking a bitmap and getting rid of the background; was even fairly fast at doing so while doing a decent job. But for the last several years (probably since I moved to Cloud) it has become worthless. If I try and add an outline to make a mask or even just add a contour cut it normally makes the software unresponsive for several minutes or crashes it altogether. Anyone else have this issue?

 

Unfortunately this doesn't help. Doesn't matter what kind of image it is or if I try and rasterize the image in Flex, still happens. Rasterizing in 150dpi or below does seem to work but then the outline is all jagged. This is not something that is rare...it always happens. As stated in my original post I used to use this feature all the time but it just doesn't work properly as it did before. Even though my original post says it doesn't work properly with a contour cut either that seems to be incorrect (I am thinking I meant outline or contour) because my workaround is actually using the contour cut option. I create the contour cut line and it does that instantly. Then outline the contour cut line, separate the outline from the contour cut, remove the contour cut line from both the outline and the original contour cut line. Then mask the original image. It's a lot of extra steps but it can be done instead of opening up a separate program to remove the background.