Maybe I'm missing something (and hopefully someone can enlighten me) but from what I've experienced and heard from others, it just seems something isn't right. With so many reports of Poser 6 locking up or stalling during rendering (a memory problem) how is it possible that Curious Labs missed this problem before going into production with the CD's? From what I understand, their website states that this is a known bug that will be fixed with the first service release, but was too late to fix in the initial run. So my question again is how could something so big and obvious be missed? Did none of the beta testers run across this problem?

As I didn't have any problem rendering (so far), it is possible none of them encountered this problem.

On a test render I can go upto 8 figures (V3) in P5 (both Firefly and P4), In P6 only up to 5 with P4 engine, and only two with Firefly!

I've had some problems rendering, I sent the crash reports to CL. (OSX) I made some changes and it renders fine. I am not sure what I changed that solved the problem, I just know it didn't happen again. I am guessing that the problems are caused by a combination of settings + figures so that is why they were missed.

I keep getting out of memory errors on renders which render fine under equivalent render settings under poser 5, even though i have 2048mb of DDR 400 RAM, something seems wrong to me somehow.

The memory error is not a memory error due the RAM, it's a bug in the code in some place, then propate to other parts and finaly explodes in another place crashing the computer. This is a typical result of software made using Microsoft's tools and the result is imprevisible. Two exactly same computers with the same Windows and software, one works for weeks without any problem and the other can't run one hour without crashing.

Well often in beta testing a lot of people do not push the software to the limits. I've been a beta tester for a number of well known companies and noticed that as a major flaw in beta testing. It makes a huge difference to take on or 2 fully dressed and textured figures and render those or take 5 or more. Most people never go beyond 4 or 5 figures I've noticed and I wouldn't be suprised that most of the beta testers have never tried a lot of figures in poser 6 at all. You'll be suprised how many bugs still not get noticed by even a hired proffesional beta testing team. This is one of the reasons DAZ and E-On adapt their beta testing strategies. Besides having a pro testing team, they also invite a lot of regular users to test the final application before releasing it. E-on for example uses 100's of them by invitation anyone can join and start testing (once he or she has been approved by E-On). DAZ is doing the same, but even on amuch larger scale with D/S. I've never seen such invitations by CL, while it's a good strategy to use. By doing such a thing you get different kind of users with different kind of tests, which is very benificial for the final release of the software. To me it really seems like testing P6 with larger scenes has not been explored to the max at all.

This worries me a lot to be honest, I didnt spend my money for half finished software (to be honest it feels like i am) I should really have been more wary after the constant crashing of pre service release Poser 5, its stupid. V3 loaded and a high res texture and 6 lights and poser has grabbed 1.3gb of memory, :(, i can feel a complaint to CL coming on.

Why give P6 out to Beta testers when we all paid to do the testing for'em.

I guess we have all learned our lessons, don't uninstall your last version of Poser until at least the first or second patches are released for the current version.