Just today my Poser started giving me fatal errors when I try to open it. It seems it gives these errors right after initializing the plugins. I was going to re-install from my original then put the 4.03 patch on. If I do this... will it kill any of my modified figures, etc.? It should only overright things that have the same name... right? Thanks!

The upgrade clobbers no files. It does fix a few things like the snake and a fish. I upgraded and had over a gig of material that was safe. It copies all your old files to a poser backup directory first. I would be more concerned with why you're crashing. Have you run scandisk to see if your HD has errors? This could be a symptom of a bigger problem. By upgrading you may not solve you problem and just bandaide it. Try scandisk and defragment your hard drive before upgrading.

I've had to re-install a couple of times, and each time I've done a complete uninstall first. Poser only deletes it's own standard figures and files, and leaves anything not in the original install, so you should be allright doing it that way. I'm not making any guarantees though. Each time, I've done a complete back-up of anything modified, just in case. maclean

Question for you. Did you recently apply one of the upgrade patches to Poser right before this began occurring or you started to use the plugins? The reason I ask is that if you don't delete the old plugins before updating and adding the new versions of the pulgins you can have problems just like this. If that is not the cause, then you will most probably need to re-install and patch the system files in the Poser root directory. You probably do not have to mess with any of the subdirectories, with the exception that you might want to wipe the plugins and update them to the current patch version. If you do have to do a full unistall/re-install your user modified files should be okay. Like many others, I find it prudent to keep a backup copy of my critical Poser program files on hand so I can just delete and copy them back if something becomes corrupted. Saves on having to go through the whole uninstall/install/patch routine. But as an added thought, don't forget to heed Mason's advice. It may be that Poser alone is not the problem.

Good News- Found the problem BAD News - File Allocation Table was trashed... lost almost everything... I REALLY hope the nice people at Zygote, the Renderosity Store and BBay will let me download all the nice stuff I lost again. Otherwise... well... otherwise I am totally screwed...

Argh! Boot with a bootable floppy disk that has FDISK.EXE on it. At the prompt, type "fdisk /mbr" (without the quotation marks). That will rebuild the drive's master boot record. If you don't have Norton Utilities, find someone that has. You only need one DOS program from Norton Utilities - NDD.EXE. Run it from an prompt as "NDD /rebuild." The "/rebuild" switch will completely rebuild your FAT by reading the start and ending file clusters for every file on your hard drive. If you're running Windows 95/98, I recommend you invest in Norton utilities 2000 (SystemWorks 2000 is even better). When installed, every time your system boots, Norton backs up your FAT. Later, if your system has a bad FAT, Norton will automatically repair/replace it for you.

Too late... I already re-formatted. DOH! Ah well. Anyway, BIG THANKS to the guys at Bbay, Renderosity Store and Zygote for helping me to get back the wonderful products that I had bought but lost during the crash. They have all been super nice and I wanted to give them all a HAND! "KUDOS!"