I use pretty much anything to create my artwork - freehand 10 or MX, InDesign, Illustrator 10. Then I save it as an eps and open it up in Illustrator & save it down as Illustrator 5.
Works perfectly when imported into the program our cutter uses. They have had problems if the eps was saved as a higher version. Fortunately they let me send them a test to make sure everything would work before I got too much work done - just in case.