I have been having the same problem a lot. I can confirm that it's having large texture bitmaps that causes the problems. I've started editing all mine down to a maximum dimension of 2000 pixels and this helps enormously. Nothing else works, I can tell you that. Turning off OpenGL improves things a little, but it becomes impossible to see what you're doing because the wireframe image is so lousy.

A little experimentation will show that Vue leaches away memory AFTER EVERY OPERATION when large bitmaps are present. Doesn't matter whether you do spot renders or anything else. Every operation, including just moving the camera around, takes Vue a step nearer crashing. Real killers are moving a Poser figure from one layer to another, or cutting and pasting them.

The only solution is this - for your scene, work out how many operations you get from loading to crashing. It may be as few as twelve. Load your scene, do ten things, save, quit Vue, start again, repeat until you get to a final version. It is inexpressably tedious, but short of reducing bitmap size it's the only thing you can do.