DAn: I thought you ran a Mac?

TB: I've been using PCs and Macs at work for a couple of years now and this last spring got a Pentium D at home. Generally do the creative work on the Mac and the rendering on the PC.

I just joined PC, downloaded all the freebie files, Bryce 6 installers, extra content etc, all up around 1.3Gb of stuff. I have installed B6 and spent all day yesterday transferring over legacy mats, sky presets, obps, tex files etc and testing to ensure they worked okay (99% did).  Most could just be dropped into the apprioriate folders and worked fine. 

I tried to take shortcuts by dragging from Bryce 5.5 directly into Bryce6>Presets>Objects. Some of my obp files from Bryce 5.5 containing a dozen or so objects each caused Bryce 6 to crash suddenly (on Mac) when I tried to creat new object and clicked on the item in the pop-up preset chooser.  It seemed drawing the thumbnail of the object caused the quit?  Anyway, something was corrupt/incompatible. Problem was solved by exporting the objects individually from Bryce 5.5 and reimporting individually into Bryce 6. The objects then load and render fine, textures intact.

I have yet to sink my teeth into Bryce 6 with a scene creation and render. HDRI to get the hang of as well...  I am using Rosetta emulator on Intel core duo Mac and thus am hanging out for the promised Universal Binary Bryce 6.1 release...

Dan, screensaver shouldn't kick in on the default scene with one sphere. It's a couple of seconds only.

That's why I said it probably wasn't hein's problem. But if I go off to do something away from my computer with Bryce just idleing and the screen saver/sleep mode kicks in during that time it still cause a subsequent render to slow to a crawl, even if it's only something simple.

XP64 3000 1Gb mem Nvid 7300 256Mb WinXP Pro SP2 <- new PC , nothing but Windows and Bryce running, installed a clean image to make sure nothing was left of the previous Bryce install. 

 Reinstalled Bryce 6 again, this time I denied the DAZStudio install, the same default opening scene now renders at 4 sec with default settings and in 1 min 04 secs with AA at premium. Wonder why DAZ adds that speedbump to Bryce.

Still something wrong. I've had the latest Studio installed on both computers.

I'm going to leave it this way, I can live perfectly well without DAZ Studio.