but I HATE it

Me too!

Side rant: CL - how about a REAL manual and help files for >once instead of just PDFs?!)

Yes, CL (or E-F), that would be great. I wonder whether these PDFs have been translated from Japanese. They are gramatically correct but in a horrible stile :-((

I remember there were some threads about crashing Poser 6 recently. Like a too large virtual memory file.
Because there seem to be many P6 users (like me) who don't have any problems at all. (Which might not be a great help for you right now ...)

Vue D'Esprit can import Poser-5 scenes with texture, as long as you don't use shader nodes. It only accepts textures (tif, jpg, gif ...).
And by the way, Vue is really a great program (although I am still using Vue 4).