I just can't figure out what is wrong. My P5 was working fine, then all of the sudden bam, it will load to the splash screen that shows the serial and then quites. I have ran adaware and spybot, Norton 2006 and trend micros service and now there seems to be now spyware or viruses on my system. But it still doesn't work. I try it in windows safemode, it loads just fine. I am running Win XP-SP2 on a Pent4 with 256Mbs f ram. I have tryed uninstalling P5 and reinstalling (Nope, same issue). Please, some one with a tech/IT background help me. I am going thu withdrawl now. :(

I'm having the same problem and I tried all the things that you did. I have P6 so I now use that one but I'd love to be able to use P5 some of the time. The last item I installed was Miki from CL (although I doubt that's the cause).
I hope someone can offer a solution to this weird problem.

If you have uninstalled and reinstalled, chances are there's a corrupted registry entry or two. Sadly, I dunno which one(s) it could be. Hope that gives you enough to work with.

It seems to me that if it runs in safe mode, something is loading during a regular boot that's conflicting with it. If, while Windows is loading, you hit F5 or F8 (I forget which), you should get a DOS screen with options. One of the options will be to launch Windows in a way that allows you to pick and choose what gets loaded. If you boot with that option you can narrow down the culprit. BTW: I'm surprised that, with only 256 meg o' RAM, you ever got P5 to work.

Thanks all for the advice, I will keep plucking away at it since the last thing I want to do right now is a full system reinstall. Uhg... BTW... sorry Jackson, I misstated my mem, I got 512, not much better. I gotta get to Fry's.. ;D

For some reason I decided to try and open P5 and, as usual, it hung up at the splash screen - but, rather than shut it down and get the program not responding message, I waited for ages and it finally loaded. I think it took about 10 minutes although it seemed like half an hour. Maybe I just need patience '-)

How long have you had SP 2 for XP installed? Did you by any chance install it recently with Poser already installed?

In my case, no. I installed SP2 when it came out with no problem.

no, I have had SP2 on my system for a good 4-5 months now or longer (can't quite remember) with no problems until recently. Here is a kicker. I tried making another admin account on the system and P5 works there :O
This is starting to get weird.