My husband kindly brought me Vue dEsprit 4 for Xmas. Only problem is that when it arrived in November, I installed it and everything worked great. Being a good girl, I uninstalled it and he wrapped it up to send to Santa. Well, on Christmas day when I reinstalled it, it no longer lets me load PZ3 files. The technicians at Eon have advised me to reinstall Poser 5. Now here is the frightening bit... I have literally thousands of bits installed in my Runtime directory. If I reinstall Poser 5, will they all be lost? Would it be ok to install Poser 5 again on my second hard drive just to trick Vue so that it will load PZ3s? Any info, advice or reassurance would be great before I go ahead and lose all my stuff - I really can't face reloading every poser bit I own!!! Thanks and Happy New Year to you all.

Reinstalling Poser will not over write any of your custom files. Remember to reinstall the service release also.

Thanks Phil! I will try it - fingers crossed.

Say, can you make a copy of your runtime and save it outside of Poser 5? Maybe you try to setup a separate runtime where you install all your additional poser goodies and leave the default runtime the way it is. This way you would not have to worry once you need to make a reinstall.

There's something I use, called "Beyond Compare" (available at http://www.scootersoftware.com). The way I do it is, I copy the runtime folder over to my D: drive, and use Beyond Compare to bring stuff in to the main runtime folder on C: (There's a 'synchronize folder' option that does this automatically, and which can be configured to only bring over missing files.)

CD-R! CD-R! if you can afford expensive software like Vue why not a cheap CD-R?

I have not done this, but I have changed hard drives and used Norton Ghost with no problems to the P5 install. So if you have a spare drive, ghost it. CD-R sounds great too. Also, I recall a while back that when you reinstall P5, you need to run in demo mode then install sr2.1 or higher so as to bypass the handshake licensing scheme. I think you only get three shots at licensing then its dead unless you call Curious Labs, so no need to waste one if you can avoid it. Do a search here. There were many who had to uninstall and reinstall back in the early days of P5. Also, I do not recall reading any posts that complained about losing the runtime so that's a good sign.

"...when I reinstalled it, it no longer lets me load PZ3 files" This might fix your problem without the hassle of reinstalling Poser: Try renaming your Poser folder to something else such as PoserTEMP. Run Vue and try importing a PZ3 file. Vue will ask you to locate your Poser.exe file. Tell it where it is. Now, quit Vue, rename the Poser folder back to the original name. Go back into Vue and repeat the process of importing a PZ3 file and telling Vue where Poser.exe is located. Give it a try and good luck!

Sorry, I have no idea what the CD-R reference is Biggert - I do have my Runtime files backed up but there are thousands and I do not want to have to reinstall them all. I tried that, Poseur. It made no difference what so ever, unfortunately. I have reinstalled my Poser 5 to my second drive and am about to see if it works. The saga continues .....