The system I'm currently using Poser 5 on has the following specs, hon: AMD Athlon XP 2400+ running at 2.0GHz 384MB of DDR RAM (I'm praying for an upgrade) HDD: 2 drives - 120 & 40. the 40 is in two partitions, the 120 in 3. 1 CDRW. All drives are NTFS format, with some compression on various folders. WindowsXP on a partition of 19GB, to which I install only MS apps (in this case, Office 2k, Office XP, Encarta, Picture It7, PhotoDraw 2.). There is a swap file of 512MB here. The second 19GB partition is dedicated to all the other programs I have installed. These are, specifically: Dramatica Pro, Storyview, Various Poser Utilities, Acid Pro 3, Acid Pro 4, Sound Forge 6, Vegas Video 4, Nero, CDRWin, Adobe Acrobat, Macromedia Authorware 7, Adobe Illustrator 9, Photoshop 6, Image ready 3, Gif movie gear, Image Composer 1.5, Fireworks MX, Your handwriting 2, Flash MX, Director MX, SwishMax, Videofactory 2, Nortons AV, WinRar, WinZip, OpenType Tools, My wacom tablet utilities, Quicktime, Winamp, MS Reader, WinDVD4, PowerDVD, Shockmachine, Shade 7, and the recent installation of the Rhino Trial. Windows has all current updates available. All my drivers are updated as of January 1st (I'm a tad behind). The second drive has a 5GB partition I skipped earlier -- so 4 partitions, my apologies -- that contains my temp directory, my VM swap file (set to 1024 minimum, 4096 maximum), my interent files, and, well, basically every temporary file windows or IE has goes there. It is a junk spot where I point everything to. Oh, and all my email from outlook goes here as well. I then have drive where I have installed my regular 3d stuff: Poser, Bryce, Carrara, more poser utilities, and the spot where I sort all my zips. It also has a toolbar that I created with shortcuts to all my most used programs. Next is a drive for my documents, which all my stuff points to. Nothing is stored in the windows drive except windows stuff, essentially. Last is a drive where I store all my loops, textures, 3d objects, and other miscellany that I use for resources when creating stuff. I have disabled services in Windows XP that are turned on by default that I do not need. I have disabled features in IE intended to make thing easier, the downside being that I cannot use java (which, I skipped, is installed to the windows drive). It works wonderfully for me. I also have several drives mapped to a separate computer, and on that computer is a copy of firebird that I also use via a shortcut on that toolbar mentioned earlier. I have a scanner (Canon) and a CF card reader, both USB, and a USB printer (HP) installed as well. My video card is an Nvidia Geforce2 Ti. (oh lord, listen to them laugh). I also have both an onboard and an adapter based IEEE1394 card for a total of 5 firewire ports I use with video. Mouse and keyboard are simple things, the old style with a ball and nothing fancy feature wise. Soundcard is an old SB Live 5.1. I think that covers about as thorough a configuration report on my system as I can think of. It's networked into a network of three clusters -- three immediately around it, the primary house server, and then the rest of the house of five, no, four pc's at the moment. The server runs 2k3. I do not, nor will I, run software that my experience has established produces instability in systems. It is only in my experience, as well -- some people need these programs to do their stuff. These includes browser add-ons, Netscape Navigator, Yahoo anything, ICQ, AIM (which I have installed on a different computer), Real Player, and various other little "helper" programs. It isn't anythign against any of theose other prgrams, either -- I simply have encountered primarily trouble with those programs specifically enough times that I will not use them myself. I hope this helps to anwer the question you asked specifically in the first place. For the second one, no, I don't think it's just you. However, I suggest you check your ImageIO folder and other odd runtime folders for temporary files and delete them -- especially any sort of shadow maps.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)