I often have Poser5 running with Photoshop7 and/or 3ds max. Along with aim and icq. PcCilin is always running. I agree with Ceba all the way and his assertions/ suggestions in those 5 lines of type are the best ones I have read in the totality of the pages on this topic. There is no way to properly asertain poser5's influence on your (specific) system without first understanding what your (specific) system is capable of and by way of running the application, what else it is processing. Clearing it all and installing fresh (with all your updated drivers) and adding apps 1by1 and trying it out by far makes the most sense. It's too bad all Poser5 users weren't capable of doing this, I bet we would see a whole lota people running this program on a computer that can't. If poser crashes right off the bat, after freshly reinstalling your system then it is obvious the problem resides in your hardware. And yes it can be something as simple as a bad partition on your hd. Or your video card or even your processor or ram... bad cable... (pick one) not enough power (cpu dependant) The ATI issues are typically with 'powered by ATI' cards. (of course they are good cards but i dont use them anymore) The issue is not necissarily with the ATI chipset but with the actual card and in most cases the inability of your mainboard bios to function with a crappy card which usually translates into system instability. That to would make it a hardware conflict. Flash your bios, I dares ya! Alos, Hisminky. To take you literally, if all you loaded on your 'vanilla' machine was what you stated, no wonder poser crashed. Come back and post when you've installed all your cpu, gpu, via, bios, etc...etc... drivers, updates and patches... Poser5 is expecting your system to be up to date. More so if your running sr3, so get out there p5's and get your updates. just my opinion.