bluetone, I unfortunately do not know enough about animation to have a feeling for how fast this should go on your system. However to better trouble shoot this you should notice what the PF Usage is in the lower window of the Task Manager>Performance tab once the CPU usage has dropped from high to low. If it is much above 1Gig then this may be the problem. (you do not have enough physical memory and paging is slowing you down) If it is below 1 Gig then check Carrara in the Task Manager> Processes tab. If the cpu entry is zero and the System Idle Process is high (90+) then Carrara has just crashed. If Carraras CPU is >0 and the mem usage is fluctuating then its running and thinks it is doing something worthwhile and the problem lies somewhere other than your hardware. Hope this helps and is understandable!