Is there something obviously wrong I might be doing?

I import .pz3, it sees the file, and then, when I try to open it, claims that it can't read it... wtf

Meanwhile, P5's Firefly can't render just about anything I'm doing in Poser, so I'm totally frustrated trying to find some medium where I can render.

Anyway, any suggestion is seriously appreciated.

I had something similar happen. All of a sudden Poser was not working correctly (I forget the symptoms) and I could not import anything into VUE. I did a re-install on Poser and everything worked properly. If you want to retain your runtime, just rename it and try the re-install. After Poser is working again, you can then either copy the runtime over the one that Poser installed or have poser point to it.

Do you have Mover 5? If not, that may be an explanation. Some Poser 5 scenes contain residues of cloth/hair animations, those cannot be read by Vue without Mover 5. You could open the .pz3 in a text editor and search for cloth/hair animation entries and delete them. Might work. I also found that exiting Vue and Poser, then restarting Vue often helps. Vue4Pro has some nasty memory leaks, starting with a clean Vue can make the difference between a successful import and a failure.

I really appreciate the suggestions... I'll try a Poser re-install. I'm not sure how to identify cloth or hair animations, but I'll look into it... Anyway, thanks again.

I moved the .pz3 file into the folder were the Poser .exe file is. Boom! Boy, but that thing is sl-oo-oo-www now. Oh, well. One problem at a time.