The ground prop is being rendered as a "shadow catcher", one of the new P6 shader options (especially useful for compositing). You can get rid of the ground prop by unchecking the "Visible" property. The preview question: Textured preview now can make use of OpenGL, which means transparencies. If your graphics card supports OpenGL, you might want to set the preview mode to OpenGL - right click on the background in the Preview tab and choose OpenGL. OpenGL doesn't always work smoothly, however. A lot depends on the graphics card. I have had lots of OpenGL trouble with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro, but all my nVidia cards (Ti4200, 6800LE, 7800GTX) work perfectly with OpenGL. I tweaked the 6800LE into a Quadro using RivaTuner - even better OpenGL stability, plus a nice performance increase. Doesn't work on the 7800 series of graphics cards, alas. If you want to open your older .pzz files, you can always uncompress them using WinZip or another Zip utility.

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