Hi Michael T., I downloaded the most recent version of Inkscape, and according to their file dialog, they only support "Adobe Illustrator 9.0 and above".

MoI exports AI format 7 files, which for most programs are more compatible than the newer style ones, but not in this particular case I guess.

It looks like they may have added a PDF importer, and so then I suppose they got the AI 9 and above bundled along with that as well, but they have not done a reader for the older AI 8 or lower format which is actually a lot more simple to read... So that's kind of surprising.

I also tested Inkscape with a bunch of sample AI files that I have that were saved from various versions of Illustrator, and it is not able to load the older AI files there either, so that is definitely the problem.

I would like to enable saving PDF and also SVG files from MoI but it may take me a while before I can make that happen.

I guess the same problem may be happening to you with Corel, although I am kind of surprised that it would not be able to handle the older AI format there. If Corel has an option to load AI version 8 or lower, then give that a try.

- Michael