Plusses Dispacement maps/ shadows Firefly rendering much better on animation. a general feeling of solidity that was not there with previous service packs. (rather a pity really I miss the feeling of will it- won't it) oh and the libraries are much better handled minuses some weirdness in the material room - not really traced it down but have had a couple of instances of complex materials hanging the system. Slower to start up (seems to take a fair time chewing over if it should load the plugins) generally a goodie (I can handle a stable poser with a longer startup time.) lots of fixes under the bonnet I confess it has made me clean up my multiplying runtimes and to get the rest of my modelling directories in some kind of order as a kind of spring cleaning. The material room anomaly is of some concern to me because some of the work I do tends to be batch run overnight. SR3 was stable enough to give me a good nights sleep after a few tweaks. However I have run two animations overnight with few problems. I tend to use one machine for this( a 2.6Ghz P4 with 1 Gb ddr 400 with western digital hdds.) so far no probs - apart from that one material room glitch - I have never had material room glitches before. PaulC