Sigh. The error message (including a Dr. Watson) apparently was a spook. Carrara is installed and runs. However, I tried to load my latest PZ3, made in P7 with V3, Heavy Horse, Harvey Mann's "I Dream of Jeannie" hair (Allura?), and the Environment set from DAZ, and it harrassed me for 20 OKs demanding a bunch of ...X.bmp files that I don't have. Needless to say, Poser loads this file without them.

Sure enough, loading PZ3's uses the old, unreliable Import approach. Haven't tried setting up the Runtime "transparently" yet, but the importer demanded that I identify my default Runtime, so the question may be moot. I'm with the folks who were given the distinct impression that TransPoser WAS the "transparent Poser load" tool. How silly of us.

For the record, here are the "non-transparent" elements of the imported PZ3:

1. V3 pose is messed up. Her left hand is embedded to the wrist in the horse. Apparently her hand is embedded in the horse because her position relative to the horse has been changed. I had to move her entire body to make the correct pose even possible.
2. Camera view lost.
3. Lights either missing or set wrong -- my night scene is a nooner.
4. Horse's texture is totally hosed, to the point that it's not salvagable.
5. Transparency discarded on the hair. Back to Fisher Price hair. Same thing happened with the fetlocks.
6. Strange "crumpling" at the joints in the horse's neck, and the "crumbles" are congruent with the places where the texture is ruined. The crumple is visible in wireframe.
7. V3's butt is crumbled, though the effect doesn't show as much in renders because the texture is not patterned. Also strange "shelves" and distortions all over her body. They render as such a mess that it's hardly worth trying to fix.
8. The "crumbles" are probably caused by C6P choosing to set Use Limits, which they call Constrain, at full. I haven't checked, but the bad spots look like they are where the figures were pushed a bit to suit the pose.
9. Many of the crumbles on V3 (with the Cat_Knight morph applied) seem to be related to injected morphs. SInce the horse doesn't have them, I'm not sure what that means.
10. During the load (I switched to a PZ3 more than three years old with Steph, Traveler's belly dance costume, Koz' Chignon, and a floor), C6P fails to locate blStephanie.obj. I have opened this file in P4, P5, P6, and P7 without this problem.
11. It can't find the textures. Any of them. I'm reinstalling them one at a time. Worse yet, every time it can't find a file, it defaults to looking for exec files (*.sha, *.exe, *.dll, etc) and announces that the file is not in the folder (and fails to display it) even if it is. Royal PIA. Of course once you have told it where the first belly dance costume texture is, it doesn't look there when it can't find the next one. There are about twenty textures for the costume, all in the same folder.... Wait! It changed its mind; now it can find them. Whatever.
12. Renders are lightning fast, but load times are horrible. It took nearly five minutes for the Godiva scene to load, not counting delays to look for textures, and three for the Steph picture. The Steph file is only 15Megs.
13. This PZ3 also has bad lights and wrong camera, but the figure is not screwed up and I can imagine taking the time it will require to get something comparable to a mediocre render in P5.
14. I attempted to take the veil to the Textures palette and fix the transparency. Instead I went to something called "BaseMess," which looks like it might be the base of Kozaburo's Chignon. But I had the veil selected! There is no obvious way to fix this except go back and try again.
    14a. Back in the main "room," apparently you can't select an object, then take it to the texture room. You have to select the material (meaning you have to know that BaseMess is the foundation for Kozaburo Chignon, for example).  And you have to do this in the Texture room. These problems existed in C5P's importer, which is another reason for bringing the file in with TransPoser. Without it, importing's middle name is PIA.
15. It doesn't matter though, because the Texture room doesn't seem to have any idea how to add transparency to the veil, even though it renders as transparent in the room. I'll wait while you read that again. That's right: The veil renders in the Transparency preview as transparent even though C6P claims to have turned the Transparency off (None), and turning the Transparency on does not change the Preview Renders in any way.
16. Ok, I found a combination of sliders that fixed the transparency, setting it around 80%. Since C6P has discarded all my transparency settings, I am looking at fixing about 20-30 more materials. A bit like changing the "Normals Forward" on a figure. One checkbox. 'Nother checkbox.... 'Nother checkbox.....
17. Unfortunately the renderer has an odd idea about the meaning of transparency. It now renders the portion of the chest covered by the "semi-transparent" veil as lighter than the skin that isn't covered. Of course. Exactly like real life....

That's enough fun for today. I have a Saturday to live in. I recommend waiting for the reviews of C6P 1.1. This looks like a not half bad modelling tool (of course, so is C5P), and it may integrate nicely with DAZ Studio. But as a tool for rendering Poser scenes, it's worthless. Unlike C5P. I recommend finding an old C5P and looking for some techie solution to loading P7 scenes into it. I think the only problem is that you must be able to point TransPoser at a pre-P7 exe file, so if all you have is P7, you are truly out of luck.
M