I've been using Poser since Version 1, and for most things, I still use Poser 4. Poser 5 has some great stuff in it, but I don't enjoy using the software. If CL would take the time to fix the following two issues alone, I'd probably retire Poser 4 and dance a jig in my office:

1. Keyboard shortcuts. Poser 5 does not play nice with Windows. In Version 5, CL somehow managed to bugger up the program's window hierarchy so that the parameter window's input events don't filter through the main application window anymore. Indeed, the parameter window almost behaves like it's a separate application, to the point of having its own button on the Windows taskbar sometimes. :-P As a consequence of all this, keystrokes are handled differently depending on whether the parameter window or the document window has focus, and many of the shortcuts just don't work if you're in the parameter window. No, you have to go and click in the document window first, being careful not to click on something and screw up your present selection. Then press the key again. You really notice this if you spend a lot of time tweaking pose dials while hopping between cameras. "Why isn't the view changing? Argh!" (click) ctrl-M, then mouse back to the dials. "Argh, that click selected a different part!" (click) Adjust a dial... "OK, let's see it in the posing camera." ctrl-, ... "ARGH!" (click) It didn't used to be this broken.

The programmers could have avoided this mess. I suppose CL will say it's a limitation of whatever busted cross-platform windowing toolkit they used for the implementation. I keep hoping that the Poser will behave more like a robust Windows application with each successive release, but Poser 5 was actually a step backward in this regard.

2. ABYSMALLY SLOW file operations. What the hell happened? I know that Poser files are large, but P4 can handle them a lot faster than P5 does. I can load an "all head morphs" injection pose very quickly in P4; the same operation in P5 goes on for minutes. Load a scene... same story. And then there's the occasional time that P5 just decides to hang after it has saved a file. Thank God the data appears to be all there, because when this happens, I have to kill P5 from the Task Manager and restart it.

Now... I am not an idiot and I am not running the software on some slow, underpowered system clogged with crappy utilities. Poser 5 is, bar none, the slowest, creakiest graphics application in my tool set. If Curious Labs would address the basic issues of efficiency and robustness, Poser 5 would be enormously more pleasant for me to use, other known bugs notwithstanding.