Well, here is something that may help you.

I have had the same sort of issues over the past few months. It is exclusively tied to the Mat Room, as far as I can tell. At one point a few weeks ago, I had a total system crash, which led me to run setup for Windows again, and overwrite all of the updates etc.

Fortunately, I didn't lose any of my data, except the Windows updates. Unfortunately, it didn't fix the problem.

So then I took another approach. I thought about it logically, and approached the issue where I thought it best served. It seems to be all about memory with large render problems. Obviously, many figures/props cause large render issues. However, wouldn't it also make sense for Mat collections to be an issue?

Looking at the raw text of a scene file, it shows that each node in the material room takes up a full 10 lines. Multiply that by however many nodes you have on each material in the scene, and you can imagine how much data you are dealing with. (This is just theory, but whitespace may also matter, and each node sits pretty far in on it's lines. 5 tabs in the scene I am looking at right now as I write this. The total size of this file is 17.7MB uncompressed, 2.3MB as a .pzz. It has 990468 lines of "code." No small file for sure.)

So what does this mean? Well, here is my working theory. Since this is all about data size, and obviously, all data must reside somewhere in memory, where is this data actively running from? Well, I have 1GB of physical RAM in my system, so that should tell me that the scene is fully sitting in my RAM, right? I don't think so.

Sure, in a perfect world, this scene file would fully reside in RAM, and should have no problems processing. However, Win2k takes something like 250MB of active memory just to boot. Then, I'm sure Windows has other things it runs in the background with available space as well. On top of that, once the OS starts, drivers load. Then, up come the TSRs, or Terminate Stay Resident programs. (Your little apps that run in your system tray, such as your anti-virus, spyware killer, IM clients, etc. You would be surprised how much room those "little" things take up.) There goes tons of memory down the tubes.

So get to the point right? Okay fine. Most people know that once all physical RAM is used up, Windows uses hard disk space for a "swap file," which simply simulates RAM to the OS. When writing to the swap file, or any disk space for that matter (including your Internet cache, that is a lot of space used up,) Windows uses the next available space on the hard drive, regardless of where that space resides.

Thinking about this, I decided, just for the heck of it, to run a defragmentation on my hard drive. My disk was an absolute mess! If you have ever run a defrag before, suffice to say there was a LOT of red in the analyzation.

So what happened? Well, in a word, nothing.

Huh? What kind of answer is that, you say? It's a GOOD nothing! So far, since that first defrag, about 2 weeks ago, I have run defrag about 5 or 6 times, each time, there was a decent amount of fragmentation. (Don't pay attention to the message that the drive does not defragging, it's like an anti-virus scan, no matter how many times you do it, it can only help, not harm, your system.)

Since that day, I have yet to have ONE lockup. No problems in the Mat Room. No problems rendering. Like I said, NOTHING!

So is this the right answer? I don't know. Am I safe from problems forever now? All I can do is shrug. Does it appear to me to have helped? The answer is a definitive YES!

Go ahead and give it a shot. It can't hurt, so no loss there. Here is a tip, locate, and download the trial version of Diskeeper. It is a very good defragmenter. Install and run it. Do this a couple of times in a row. Yes, it's a pain, but it will really clean up your disk, which is your ultimate goal here. While I didn't bother, you can also run it's boot-time defragger, which I have used in the past, and it's pretty good. Now I don't condone stealing software in any form, so if you don't want to pay for it after the 30 day trial is done, just uninstall it. From that point on, just use the one built into Windows. If you do this very regularly, the Windows one is very capable of the job. I have found the built-in version to be somewhat lacking when the drive is significantly fragmented already.

Yes, this has been very long winded, but I hope it has made some sense, and further, I hope it helps! I'd love for this thread to get some updates from those who try out my suggestion. Please share your findings, so we can all benefit. Whether your results are good, or bad, it helps to try to get to the bottom of the issue.

(Something interesting to note. I just found out this morning that Poser's Mat Room is a derivative of Pixel3D's Tempest shader. Who knows how the conversion from Mac, which Pixel3D is for, worked out. This is common problem in game programming. PCs are so varied from desktop to desktop to laptop, that it is wholly impossible to test for every possible configuration. That's why PC games so often need patches to "fix" where the same exact game runs on a XBox or Playstation without a hitch. Macs are basically like consoles. There is a specific design when you buy a Mac. It's going to have basically the same parts from one to the next. Think about how many different video cards alone we each have. I have 4 desktops, and a laptop here, and each has totally different parts running it.)

Okay, enough rambling. If you have read this far, thanks for listening. If not, you aren't seeing this anyway so :m_tongue2:

Later!