I'm not even entierly certain that this is a problem with Vista or not, but when I reach a point in my renders where it requires a reflection map, the program crashes. I know that Vista has issues with OpenGL, but my videocard (ATI Radeon x1300) has functions that are supposed to correct most of these issues. 

What I really don't understand is that I have rendered all of these images once before on the same system and now, for whatever reason, as I go back to render them again they crash.

I've restored the compute back to the point where I had previously rendered the images, but it still is giving me problems, and aside from that, the few that do render have small white spaces periodically throughout the renders.

This is totally throwing me for a loop, as everything was working fine until a day or so ago. I don't know if it was a windows update, or something else that I must have missed, but I can't find any reason that the programs would just stop working =/

Does anyone else have Vista and use DAZ?
I would really rather not have to reboot my computer, as it would change my warentee for my new computer :(

Thanks.

What sort of render are you doing - OpenGL or 3Delight?

It's set to render in 3Delight, which is something else that's boggling me =/
I installed 3delight again before any of this happened.

I was told though, that for some things, DAZ uses OpenGL anyway . I assumed that this was part of the problem :(

So you have a free-standing installation of 3Delight, as well as DAZ|Studio's rendering plugin? That could conceivably be causing problems, I suppose. However, if it's choking on reflections that sounds more like a system overload - try reducing the bucket size or the ray trace depth in the Advanced tab of Render>Render settings and see if it renders more of the image.

Well, I reduced the bucketsize to 8 and everything else to 2 and it still crashed when it got to that same spot, so I uninstalled the free-standing version of 3delight to make sure that wasn't the problem. Unfortunately, even after uninstalling the free-standing 3delight (to make sure that wasn't the problem), it continues to freeze with even those low render settings. =/

Now, I should note that it's freezing when it reaches the characters eyes. I dont know what that would have to do with it, as the pair of glasses she is wearing are rendering fine, and I've tried changing the eye textures as well.

I've rendered these scenes completely before and the only changes that were made were to a completely different character in the scene than the one having the problems. DAZ support has yet to respond to me (They haven't responded to any of my help requests since I was having trouble with my old system last year and asking for assistance on a semi-regular basis), so I'm still totally stumped. :(

Are the eye textures in the same location as the rest of the textures? What are your settings in the Advanced tab of Render>Render settings? Does it still crash if you remove the textures from the eyes? How about if you do a spot render? The problem is that Vista is new and so not many people have it, and those who do don't yet know the catches and work-arounds. As an XP user all I can do is try to spot things that might provoke a different response from the OS.

If you've never had a reply from Tech Support it sounds as if you may be falling victim to the a spam filter - possibly on your system but more likely, if you check your spam folder, at the ISP level.

Thanks again :)

The eye textures are in the same location yes. I still don't know what was causing the problems :(

DAZ support finally got back to me and said they couldn't find any reason from the log files that DAZ wasn't functioning, so I went back to Vsta suport and they had me do a system restore to the initial factory settings when the program and the files were working.

Now I can't even get those files to load properly =/

DAZ works, my other files are fine, but the files I was working on before (the ones that were crashing) won't even load. (the log file sayd it's a read memory error?)

My business partner and I are about to throw the computer out the window, as this sets us back about 6 months...SO we're going to try loading the files on yet another computer and see if it's the files that somehow got corrupted =/

Remember that in order to load a saved .daz scene file, you need the native geoemtry files in the data folder that go with the objects and morphs used - if you don't copy those 9and it may be worth trying to satrt over) you'd need to load the Poser original figures and morphs into a new scene, save, and only then open your own scene.

nods

I'm going to try to load them on another computer and see if the files at least still work.

When I backed up my folder, I backed up the entire content folder including the Data files, so that the geometries would remain intact. 

I don;t know what's causing the problem exactly, so I don't know what's missing... And the bug report people aren't replying to me (again - which is why I submitted through the site last time and not a bug report - already checked my spam filters).  I don't know if it would be a problem that the drive letter changed and then was changed again? That's the only  thing I can see different from the original startup files from last time.

Smaller files work too, so I'm wondering if my 4 gigs of RAM STILL isn't enough... 

As long as the paths in Edit>preferences>Directories are correct changing the location of the content files shouldn't hurt (in fact, I've found that D|S will read the data fodler even if it's in the root of a Poser content directory, so as long as it's in some mapped folder, and not in a subfolder, it should work).

Well, Firstly, I want to thank you for trying to help. In the end I still don't know what caused the problem.. I ended up having to reset the computer back to factory settings and lost the files that I had been working on to some sort of corruption. 

I decided not to reinstall a standalone 3delight and left the DAZ engine as it was, and so far have't had any issues with the program at all.

The only difference I can see now is that I'm prompted to install twice for every file shrug