Running P7 sr 2.1, defragged less than a week ago. no viruses shown up.

Sometimes while rendering it will complete the picture, the progress bar will be at the end, and then poser is "not responding" ( in task manager ) so i have to kill the process.

Other times it will go "not responding" when conforming items or trying to save a pose to the library.

this has been using V4, v4.1/v4.2 , though im not sure if that even matters.

I don't know if its all the same problem or different problems, but any help or suggestions would be great.

do you get a firefly render engine error?  I was and what I realized was I had my number of render threads set to high in my poser 7 preferences

 not getting any errors but I will try and lower the # of threads. its at 4 right now. I've been running it at 4 since i got it ( and not external process - never seems to work for me )

hope that will help...I had the same problem....was running 3 threads since day one, then all the sudden...couldn't get a render to finish...I changed it back to 1 external process and it works again. On my pc, if I dont  render as a seperate process...it takes FOREVER

 i dont think i will be buying Poser 8 if it ever comes out. This program is completely unpredictable. I can do the exact same thing 3 times in a row, and it will crash 2 times, but not the 3rd. I can do it differently, and it will crash, and then repeat exactly, and it won't.

If i ever get my promo renders done, I think i'm just going to hang my hat up in the poser world. I've never encountered another software as frustratingly unstable and crappy as this one.

I guess we all have a love/hate relationship with it, lol.  Until this issue, though, poser 7 had been, for me, the only version that didn't have lots of quirks and bugs. :(

 it ran fine for months. then it just crash and crash and crash. I cannot pinpoint a reason. extremely upsetting.

i feel your pain...i tried everything I knew, even reinstalled poser..no joy. it took me forever to think of changing the render settings, because like you said...it ran fine for over a year like that...so why go all nuts now..makes me rather sick when i think of all the lost production time.

When was the last time you defragged your hard drive? odd as it sounds having a fragmented hard drive can cause Poser to throw a hissy fit right in the middle of renders.

I am having a similar problem. except mine seems to be any dialog box pops up and i hit OK or cancel or anything that should make it go away and poser will stop responding and the dialog will not disappear.

I have determined it is something on my machine. This began happening after i got an update from several programs.

my first attempt at isolating the problem was to go to task manager and kill all processes that had me as the "user name". After doing that Poser worked like a charm.

I have since killed several "quick start" type processes and I am currently in the process of trying to track down what is interfearing with Poser.

 tyger -> mine was doing that as well.

i don't know what i did but poser has been working fine for about 5 hours straight.

Lucifer_The_Dark-> all you read was my topic title ?

 I spoke too soon. its still randomly crashing with no reliable trigger.

I'll wake up in a minute, I did actually read the whole post honest :p

 lol. well im trying a scandisk. if it ever finished (25% of 5of5) then i am going to try turning down my hardware acceleration. Seems that it could cause the inexplicable random CTDs, even though i have the drivers they suggest.

I'm currently considering picking up Poser for my mac but i hate spending $250 on it.. again..

Quote - I'm currently considering picking up Poser for my mac but i hate spending $250 on it.. again..

Former owners offered cheaper versions if you wanted to switch from PC to Mac or the other way round. So if you really intend to do that it can't hurt to ask.

 thanks for the info, dizzi, gonna shoot them an email.

When I render in C4D, a render window opens and if something goes haywire, I just close the render  window and adjust some settings. No ctl-alt-del and restarting the program.
It also tells me if I don't have enough memory BEFORE attempting to render.
I wish Poser could do this.