"Slowing down" and "Crashing" are two different things. So which is it? P5 can sometimes look like it is frozen when it is not - you need to be patient and not push the panic button too quick or you will make it crash when it was just "thinking". Also remember that some of the new handy features in P5 (dynamic hair and cloth etc) can take a LONG time to process and render. Also products are coming to the market with HUGE texture maps which can further cause what seems like a system slowdown. Downsize your textures and you will see a huge jump in render speed. If your final render is 1024x768 you hardly need a 4000x4000 body texture unless you are examining the lint in Vic's navel. Win XP on a Pentium 4 provide the most stable Win Platform yet, but with all the eye candy turned on even with a 2.4GHz processor, it will slow down your apps to about the same speed as they are on a P3 850 MHz machine. Finally learn about the differences between Firefly and P4 rendering. There are a lot of things you can control in Firefly that were not available in P4. Learning how to use these features will speed up your renders and minimize lock-ups in Poser. Other things that cause Poser 5 to lock-up but are NOT the fault of P5: Poorly made Mat Pose files for Poser 4 which have illegal text characters in them (I found that virtually ALL the early Python scripts for making MAT poses in PPP inject some non-printing characters in the file which will cause problems in P5 but seem to work fine in P4. Light sets with named lights developed on non-English language systems. Swapping to one of these light sets will often cause your first render attempt to freeze, and might crash Poser on loading the light set - beware of foreign lights ;-) Textures over 2000x2000 - use them with extreme caution, and avoid using several in one scene. Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Outlook and Outlook Express - having these open for long periods of time while using Poser will eventually cause Poser to freeze. Don't blame Poser for this - tell Bill Gates. Aggressive Anti-Virus programs - these days we all need good AV protection. Unfortunately the trade-off with these powerful AVs is very poor system performance, and occasional instability. Turn OFF your AntiVirus (or in particular, the process known as System Scanning) while using Poser and you will get greater stability in Poser. Try these things. On my 2.4 GHz P4 machine with Win XPh I have never had a system crash (where the entire system locks up) but I have had a few lock-ups in Poser which could ALL be traced back to one of the above problems. Typically I use Poser 12 hours a day and only have to reboot my XP machine about once a week. I reboot my Win 98 machines 1 or 2 times a day ;-0