The duplicate texture issue (and their removal) was one I ran into when I did my Siege series. Getting rid of the dupicates can save a lot of space on some scenes, less on others (depending on how the thing was put together). I'm guessing though that the only duplicate textures you have are the horse skins. (I liked somone's comment about it being a combination of 3d and photo lol)

I seem to remember reading that Vue has (allegedly) some advanced texture caching or some such thing to allow it to work better with large texture maps, but from my experience it seems worse than bryce at coping with the large textures that you get with poser.

Dreams are just nightmares on prozac...
Digital WasteLanD