AntoniaTiger, thanks for that link. I have been thinking for a while about writing an app to free up RAM, and I never thought to look for a freebie app to do it for me!

Richardson, I have been meaning to contact you about your crashing problems. (I have been watching your issues on your gallery postings.) I have an idea for you to try before you do something as drastic as a Windows reinstall. (Keep in mind, I mentioned that it didn't actually help me.)

What you can do, and something I have done a couple of times to fix up my system, is to run a CHKDSK on your hard drive. I don't recall if you ever mentioned what OS version you are on, but CHKDSK is the replacement for the old ScanDisk Windows utility in versions up to, I believe, WinME.

What this utility does is checks the sectors of the hard disk, and tries to repair any problems it finds. You would be surprised to see how sectors get corrupted in day to day use of Windows. Using Poser seems to increase this "damage." (Note: damage is a terrible word to use here, because I don't want to make anyone think Poser is causing hardware problems for them. What I mean is that for whatever reason, that only MS can possibly know, significant I/O just freaks out drives. My belief is that this is directly tied to the defragmentation issues Windows has. Someday, MS will figure it all out, I hold that hope closely. Again though, Poser is not hurting your system. Windows file access is. And no, I am not a Windows hater, I'm actually a big fan, but these are the problems we deal with, and I don't sugar coat. )

So, to run CHKDSK, go to My Computer (not mine, yours :biggrin: ) and right click on the drive. Choose Properties from the resulting menu. On the popup, choose the Tools tab. The first option should be Error-checking. Click the Check Now button. The next popup will present you with options for the checking. Check off both options (Automatically fix file system errors, and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.) Chances are, you are running this utility on your primary drive. If that is the case, you will receive a message that Windows cannot run the utility at the current time. It will however set itself up to run on the next system restart. It will start automatically on the next reboot, unless when you reboot, you explicitly stop the process from running before it starts (which I don't suggest.)

My suggestion is not to run this unless you don't need the computer for a day. I have an 80GB hard drive, and it takes in the neighborhood of 16 hours for it to complete. (Keep in mind, this is doing some very low-level work on your hardware.) Expect to lose significant time on this process, but it is good to run it when you are having crashing problems. It could just be some data sitting on some corrupted sectors. When you run this, it will move that data to a clean sector, and fix the original one, thereby fixing up the disk.

If for whatever reason you can't run it this way (though I don't know why that would happen, unless you had a blue screen you couldn't recover from, which I have,) you can also run it from the Recovery Console.

The Recovery Console is a bit daunting if you have no experience with MS-DOS. To run it, boot to your Windows installation disk. When you get to the first screen with options, choose the option to Repair a Windows installation. Follow the prompts to enter the Recovery Console (I can't recall the exact key sequence to reach it, but it should be easy enough to figure out.) Once the console starts, you will be on a black screen with white lettering, very much like MS-DOS. If you type the word help, it will list all available utilities (though this isn't necessary, but you may be interested in the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR utilities, I was.) You can type CHKDSK /? (which will show you the parameters available to the utility. I believe the command you want to use is CHKDSK /F but I don't recall off the top of my head, so check to make sure by using the /? parameter first. Again, this process will take many hours, so be prepared to walk away from the system for a long time.

I know this is another long post, but hopefully it will help you, or anyone else, for that matter.

Pandorian, I really hope this helps you out. I'm glad it at least gives you some hope.

Again all, if any of these suggestions help, please bump this thread with your results, so others can benefit as well!