Brooke...tried defragging (even tho my system does it weekly anyway) no dice. also moved my swap file to a different drive which has more than 10G's contiguous free space still no luck. I'm thinking the file I'm working on may have been corruupted in some way. I think I'll redo it from a past incremental save and if that doesn't work i'll reinstall Poser 5 but not SR3 I think I have SR2 backed up somewhere on a CD. Thanx for the input any other flashes of divine insight please post 'em. Thanx DrJest