Can anyone shed any light on why this happening? I have been using Poser 5 for just over a year - I am on SR3, no problems so far. Yesterday I installed Injection Magic and (wrongly as it turned out) The SR1. I was advised by Daz to uninstall Injection Magic, then Reinstall without the SR1. Prior to doing that Poser had been running fine. I followed Daz's advice, then when I fired up Poser I got what you see on the screen shot. I have to enter my name and serial number to start Poser now. Anyone have any ideas what may have caused this? And more to the point how to solve it! I had a look at this .dat file and get a pop up Notepad window that says "Cannot open H:Poser5Poser.dta file. Make sure a disc is in the file you specified" Help!!

Sorry that should read "Make sure a disc is in the Drive you specified"

On the surface of this, it seems like you have an actual bad data sector on your harddisk, and you may indeed have to run chkdsk to see if you actually do have any bad sectors on your harddisk. The flip side is the file may have just been corrupted during your second Poser installation - this file is apparently the one responsible for storing the serial number for your product. If poser can't read the file, it'll keep asking for your serial number. You MAY be able to delete this file, and once Poser starts again and asks for the serial, that might be the last time it asks, because it MAY just recreate the missing file automatically. To test this theory, try renaming or moving the bad file somewhere else, and then restart poser. If it asks for a serial number again, supply it. Then close poser again and restart it once more - if it starts without asking for the serial or giving you the error message then problem solved. Finally, if all this fails - well, you may have to reinstall poser 5 again - but make absolutely sure that all remnants of your old install are gone. The only other thing I can think of is to look on the install CD and see if you can just copy a new version of this .dta file over the old one. Hope this helps more than it confuses! Jack

FreeJack, Thanks for taking the time to offer advice. It is much appreciated. I have actually had to remove Poser and re-install it as after entering the serial number manually twice, the darned thing decided it wasn't going to play anymore and refused to even open ;-( - So I am ready to roll again, and even took the opportunity to install SR4 now. Angela.

Well I'm glad to hear you are back at it! Regards, Jack