It appears that updating to SP4 (from trusty SP2) has hosed Poser (both P4 and P5). Anyone had this happen? I'd just remove SP4, but being blindly optomistic, I unchecked the option to allow that. Oops. Obviously, I can just reinstall, but I'm hoping to avoid that, and I'm too tired now to think of anything that could be causing this. This may be the impetus to get some new hard drives and start anew, but I'd rather it not be just yet. Any suggestions/ideas/etc. would be appreciated.

An addendum, since I realized I didn't describe what it does at all. Or more accurately, what it doesn't do. Running the program (both of them) now results in it hanging before it's ever loaded (it freezes at the splash screen, basically). Never happened before, and was working just fine yesterday before I installed SP4.

Are you connected to a network or Internet? If so, try again disconnected (unplug the network cable).

Just a weird question. Did you disconnect your printer? I know Poser won't work when your printer has been disconnected. I think it just starts to load, then goes back to the desk top. It's not exactly the symptom you described, but it's worth a shot.

also a "too simple" long shot, but if you are using a Windows shortcut to start Poser, make sure the "Start in" directory in the shortcut is still correct.

It appears it won't work now when my network connection is active, and seeing as how I have DSL that's always on, that's bad. My firewall doesn't appear to be stopping it from doing whatever it's trying to do. Ugh. May be time to install another firewall. Grrr.... Thanks for the ideas folks, this has gotten me onto the right track. I hope.

It appears I was wrong. I had a feeling this would be the case, but a demo I installed for a program looks as though it was incredibly intrusive and was making everything...stupid. So after removing it, doing some registry fixing/hacking, and other assorted things, we're back to good. My apologies, SP4. You don't suck. Yet. And again, thanks to those of you who replied, and those who looked and dindn't know what to say. ;)

Ahhh....good.

When I saw "SP4" in the subject header, I immediately thought of Poser 5 SP4....causing problems.

It was good to see the "Win2k" caveat thrown in.......

whoopdat, Your assumption that it was SP4 isn't that ridiculous. I just had a series of horrendous problems with 3d studio max after installing SP4. Every file I saved became corrupted, and even simply clicking on the files in Explorer caused Explorer to crash. I had no idea what was happening. I re-installed max several times. Then I did some hunting on the net, and it turns out that it was SP4 after all. There had been a flood of complaints from max users after SP4 came out, and M$ and Discreet got together and released a hotfix for it. So now everything is hunky dory again. But I won't be in a big hurry to install SP5 until it's been thorougly checked out. mac

maclean, that's rough! Like I said, I really didn't want to think it was SP4, but I couldn't come up with anything else (until I remembered that other stupid thing I installed, which works great, aside from breaking everything). But I completely understand your reluctance to try new service packs. It took a long time to get me to try SP1, and then SP2, and now, SP4. Notice I never mentioned SP3, because I skipped it entirely (and with good reason, I think). 2k has been good to me thus far, at least.