Freehand 11 MX Blues?

All hail fellow designers. Do any of you have this problem... Whenever I apply an effect to a graphic in Freehand - be it vector or tiff - like transparency / gradient fill etc it distorts EVERYTHING when you print it to pdf. I have to make the entire background with effects in Photoshop and import it which is a total pain in the azz. What the hell is going on? Is it a bug in Freehand? If I do effects in Corel and pdf it works fine. Any solutions?