I just realized I have Poser 4.02 and not 4.03 ... thank goodness. From all the posts I have read, the consensus seems to be that 4.03 and 4.02 are identical except for logo change, Gigabyte ram change, and a network check for other instances of Poser. (My 4.02 works great with Michael, hands and all. No probs anywhere else either.) Anyway, my question has to with the fix I mentioned last. I have a small HOME network ... I have three desktops and two laptops on it. I constantly am running more than one instance of Poser (sometimes as many as 3 or 4 instances!). I mean what good is it to have all these computers if I can't work on my next Poser scene while the last one is taking several hours (or more) to render? Are they telling me I need to get a seperate license for each computer even though only ONE PERSON (my wife is basically computer illiterate and my kids are 3, 1, and 5 weeks) could possibly be using Poser at the same time?!? And I imagine the next release of Poser (the pro Pack and Poser 5) will have this feature enabled, right? What is an honest person with a home network (who wants to be productive) to do??? -Tim

Tim--It's pretty standard software licencing stuff for any commercial product. I'm surprised you haven't run into problems before, using more than one program licenced to the same name with the same serial on the same network. I would assume that most software companies don't plan on a single person running multiple copies of the same software at home. Considering that there is multi-user licensing available, it would be a huge waste of resources to make specific licensing available on a case by case basis.

DS3: Well, maybe they should. Do they (or you) honestly expect me to buy 3 or more licenses for the software?? I have After Effects Prod. Bundle and it uses a dongle, but it is only a problem if I'm using a Prod. Bundle feature. I have tons of other software and don't run into this problem, and I doubt it has anything to do with my network runnning through a Linksys Cable/DSL router. I do have one program, InfoSelect, which (annoyingly) does this check, but I bypass it by unplugging the network from my laptop while it loads then plug it back in. But it's a real pain in the neck to unplug the network from the desktop computers, which is more likely the scenario with Poser. I'm glad every software company does not implement these idiodic schemes ... my word they're paranoid!! Heaven forbid someone (like me) wants to have absolute redundancy on another HOME system! -Tim -Tim

Well actually what you do is exactly the reason that these things exist. Do what you want, but its still software piracy (note: i am in no way jusdging your actions, just making an observation)

Tim the feature is there to stop you doing exactly what you are doing, you can run Poser on as many machines as you want but only one at a time, now this may seem annoying to you a home user but what if a big company buys one copy of poser and runs it on 25 machines all networked?.....Steve

The free "ZoneAlarm" personal firewall software will stop P4 from being able to do it's network check, every time. (As long as you set it to do that) I only noticed this by accident, because I had the ZoneAlarm program running the first time I launched P4 after installing it.

heyas; you need to read your end user license agreement. for real! it will explain in there (somewhere) how many concurrent copies of poser you are allowed to have going.

If you've got a mac you can run a program called incognito to block specific programs from registering on the network, I used to use it to stop softwindows from doing the same check in a lab of 20 machines, we bought 20 copies, but over the years lost the codes. Works a treat, you just run the software on one box after it's registered then you select the ID you require, and block it, copy the config file to the rest of you machine, and you're set. later jb

Just had a thought, a way to get around this on a home (PC) network is to do some form of IP masqerading, where each machine is on a different subnet, with a base server setup to recognise each machine and pass it data as a gateway would. I'm betting that it only checks the local subnet for copies, not different subnets... This is what people do to access a single dialup account from any machine on a network, while the account only serves on IP address. All the traffic is originated from one server which does NAT on the address to make it look normal. Just a thought... later jb