I was rendering in a seperate process until things went quantum.

here's how it runs :

pre SR 1: Poser and Zonealarm get along fine.

post SR 1 : Poser renders fine. Zonealarm gets along fine. then...

next render Poser comes up blank as if blocked. Zonealarm looks worried and checks it's settings. nothings changed.

so trying a couple more things, but reporting this to techsupport in the morning. I'm not sure why it's not working when it was working fine...