I've noticed alot people having problems with Vue. One of the main things I found out was Vue uses alot of memory and processor power. Some suggestions to those having problems with crashes is to open your taskmanager and shut down anything you don't need (at least while using Vue). I found out after doing this I don't get anymore crashes, also I'm operating it on an onboard video chip so you don't need the best video card to run Vue. When it comes to rendering animation just check out www.belino.net pretty amazing. If you want to speed things up create yourself a network. I rendered a 3 second scene at 1600 X 1200 and played it on a 51 inch widescreen and was amazed at the quality, every bit as high as a Pixar animation. It took 24 hrs on a P1.5 640k memory. I was impressed. Even at Pixar it takes anywhere from 6 to 12 hours to render one frame for final production and the have an extremely powerful network farm. Vue by far is the easiest software to figure out without a manual, combine it with poser and you can do pretty amazing things.