Hi,

Correction about the memory limit of 32-bit Windows.

The 2 GB limit that people know of in 32-bit versions of windows is "per-application". I am not sure if the OS (e.g. Windows XP) can see 3 or 4 GB although the theoretical maximum address range is 4 GB. The extra memory (beyond 2 GB) will be useful since some of the OS tasks can use this memory and leave a full 2 GB for poser (if poser does not have some internal limitations on memory addressing range).
The RAM doesn't make poser faster, it just makes it able to render more complex scenes, with more polygons and larger textures. However if you don't have enough RAM and poser starts paging working memory to disk then the rendering will slow to a crawl or possibly halt.

A fast processor is essential for big complex renders using lots of figures because poser seems to do all of the hard work in the CPU (processor) and makes no use of advanced GPUs (Graphics Processors) that have multiple pipelines and special floating point processing support for texturing and ray-tracing.

Poser has been reported as being not very clever about dynamically sized paging files so many Poser users recommend having large fixed size page files of approximately 3 GB.

If you want to future proof your system then you might want to investigate the AMD 64 bit processors which should be supported late next year by a 64 bit version of windows. We can only hope that Curious Labs build a 64-bit version of Poser 6 too and then the memory-rich can start doing amazing scenes with 30 or so fully-clothed Victoria 3s infront of a temple.

Also to answer your other points: Poser likes its runtime folder in one place (I believe) but you could save your downloads and pz3 scenes on another drive. I don't think that there are any major differences between XP home and XP pro that would affect Poser performance.

Regards from Jovial.