I finally braved it and installed all the P5 updaters. I had been running the "out of the box" version for months, and while it was mostly stable, it was somewhat slow after running for about an hour. Well, after the updates, it is ENTIRELY stable (no odd face room or material room issues), and it is sooooooo much faster I can actually work at a good pace. Nice! And I didn't know what I was missing with the atmospheric volume/lighting options. Sha-weeeeet! :)

Good for you, wish it would work equal well on all machines. I like it much better P4.

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same over here.. got it installed out of the box.. run all the update patches lately.. looked around for an hour or two the most at all those new interfaces.. went back to good old Poser 4 with no scruples at all! hehe! Rena

Silver, Do you think that is stable enough that I can purchase and use it without problems?

Well, for $150 at Amazon, I wouldn't pass it up. From what I can tell, performance issues seems to be a very individual thing, with the variables of OS and processor type, other apps, etc. affecting it. I'm running Win2k pro on a self-built Intel P4 2.0Ghz with 512MB of RAM (sometimes 1GB when I pull from other machines that aren't doing anything), an 80GB 7200 rpm hard drive, and a GeForce 64MB MX400 video card (yes, it DOES make a difference for the GUI speed; render time is not affected one way or the other by the video card though.) I've heard that WinXP gives even better performance than 2k. A big thing for me is I don't have a lot of "junk" apps installed - no "cracked" software, since the hacks can cause problems with the OS. I also don't run any p2p apps like Kazaa, etc., nor the latest greatest of everything under the sun. Like I said, it's very individualized. Running the least amount of apps and a lean system will help tremendously. Also - when you have Poser open, resist the urge to surf the web while it's rendering. My system crawls when I do this. IE must hog some serious RAM nowadays.

Poser 5 on my Win XP 2.4Ghz box was always stable, but when I launch Poser and see the startup screen I cannot do anything till it starts. I can't launch Poser then launch PSP or anything, I must wait till I have my poser desktop then and only then I can start PSP or Explorer.

Thank you guys!

I finally got P5 to run smoothly, and have identified a couple of things that might help others who are using Win98 - buy not necessarily Win2000 and WXP which manage memory and resources differently so may not help with those OS: 1) avoid using jpegs compressed as "progressive" - if you are making textures, please use standard compression only. This is more of a Windows problem and should not be blamed on Poser, but using progressive jpegs will eventually crash your IE browser too - the same way that constantly re-loading them into Poser does. I re-compressed all my important high res textures and have reduced Poser crashes by 80%. 2) Textures greater than 2048x2048 should be used with caution - they cause occasional crashes if you have several this size or larger in a scene (I think the mathematics is just not geared to accurately processing numbers greater than 2048 - or this is the way it appears). I have made several scenes using up to 30 2000x2000 textures without a problem, but scenes with only two or three 3000x3000 textures will crash about every fourth or fifth render. Reducing these textures to 2048x2048 maximum, has elimainated many crashes for me. 3) If you use a memory manager, do NOT allow it to remove unused DLLs from memory (as some managers recommend) - During a Poser session, Poser loads many DLLs when launched, but may not use one DLL for a couple of hours, but when it needs it, and it isn't where it left it, it will crash. Just doing these three things has enabled me to create complex sacenes, swap textures freely, and have a Poser 5 session lasting several hours (the better part of a day) without a hiccup.