Thanks everyone for the helpful hints. I will try some of these various things. I already did upgrade with the SR1.

I too tried to work around the problem for awhile, many of my scenes were done with each person rendered separately, then imported individually into yet another separate background scene. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn't. In any event it certainly excelled at eating up a lot of extra time!

I originally intended to upgrade to at least 1 GB ram, but found out my computer uses an extremely expensive type of ram and that amount of RAM would cost me the equivalent of a new machine. So I thought I'd squeak by with the 768 for awhile - and just adding that 512 cost several hundred dollars. I'm not willing to invest much more in an older machine for what amounts to a hobby for me.

Still, I could almost cry when I think of some of the fabulous scenes and characters that have been lost due to that cursed "out of memory" gremlin.