I have a corrupt pz3 file and when I try to open it in Poser, Poser stops working. I bring up that Ctrl-Alt-Del function to see what's going on and I see: Poser not responding. I have to close Poser and re-open it in order to work with Poser. When I have a corrupt file say in MSWORD, I get the msg: the file can not be opened. But MSWORD continues to work. Can I try open a corrupt file in Poser without causing to Poser to stop working? [I mean when I am going to open a file that is corrupt before I open it I do not know that it is a corrupt file -- and it is very annoying to see how Poser stops working. ]Thanks for your help. BonBonish

MSWORD is only trying to read the file and present it contents to you in a text format. Poser is trying to read the contents and process the content so that it is a three dimensional image. While I agree that Poser shouldn't stop responding, it's more difficult for the Poser application to handle a corrupt file than the MSWORD application. The only way I know out of this is to try and edit the pz3 file back to a valid format. How easy this is will depend on... How easy you find it to understand the pz3 format. How corrupt the file is. It's probably easier to recreate the scene, you'll find that if you spent days creating a scene, you can normally recreate it in a few hours as you know where you are going. A way to avoid this situation is to use the save as function. I use this method... V < 2 digit version number> For example... Knight V01 Started.pz3 Knight V02 Added castle background.pz3 Knight V03 Adjusted pose.pz3 etc, etc. Make sure you always save the file in the same directory, not as easy as it sounds as Poser will point you to the last directory you accessed. If you get a corrupted file, just go back to the previous version. Better still, if you mess something up you can go back a version and either continue from that version or copy the pose/material/whatever into the current version.

P.S. If you do want to try editing the pz3 file, there is a very brief description of the layout in the Poser 5 handbook in the appendix which applies to all versions, I believe, and can be downloaded from the Curious Labs website.

"progam not responding" This does not always mean what it says, sometimes it is still processing in the background. If it is a large file it may be the case. Have you tried another text editor?

The problem is that a "properly" coded application should discontinue working on the file instead of discontinuing working. I don't care if it's processing a 1mm-resolution world map, when it encounters errors, it should recognize it, alert user, and stop processing. Poser is both notorious and praised for its loose interpretation of its file formats (it'll load almost any configuration). But when the file is corrupt, it should handle it correctly. Sometimes, yes, you will get a "program not responding" when it's evaluating a large file, but usually this will be a LARGE file (like 200MB or 10GB). Most of the time this signals that the system is unable to process any more requests for the application and it's dead - most of the time. BYS

Poser tends to have memory leaks when encountering any problem...a corrupt file, mising geometry, whatever. Any time you hit an error like that it's a good idea to restart Poser. And if you actually crash or freezw poser, reboot.

Thanks to all of you for taking the time for answering my question. And special thanks to Smiler1 for pointing me to the Poser 5 handbook. I definetely will go there and read about that possibility. One more thing I would like to say: Thanks Smiler1 for the advice of using the below saving system: Knight V01 Started.pz3 Knight V02 Added castle background.pz3 Knight V03 Adjusted pose.pz3 etc, etc. I just would like to say that I am using that type of savings -- together with their images that allow me to see what is on my image in an image viewing program. My problem is that if for example: vo3 corrupted then vo2 corrupted too and so on... I do not know why is that... And another thing that I would like to say to Lyrra: You are so righ -- yes that what I am doing -- rebooting and rebooting... But I think in order to talk about re-booting, and how many re-booting a day is still healthy to our computer we need to open another topic :::))))