As  P7 user who wants his renders to look better, should I bother with Espirit?  I am struggling with Carrara 6, but I remain naively convinced I can make that work.  But from what I gethe Vue is easier than Carrara.  How do they compare in rendering and how about importing P7 PZ3s?

I can't help you compare renderers, but Vue will love your Poser scenes. Bear in mind though that a lot of ram will be necessary to avoid crashes and out of memory errors, this is due to the huge size of some poser textures.

Well,for me Carrara wasnt any good.Far to memory hungry,and no where near the Poser friendlines as Vue.I vote Vue BIG TIME!

I bought Carrara assuming that it could cope with Poser 7 scenes - wrong! Since then I've been trying to use Daz Studio, Poser 6 and Carrara 6 all without much progress. Last Tuesday I took the plunge and bought Vue 6 Esprit as it is on special offer for Poser users ($99 until March 1) http://www.e-onsoftware.com/about/flashnews/021308/Poserflash.html When you register you also get $15 credited to spend at the Cornucopia3d store.

Carrara has functionalities Vue doesn't: IK; Particles; and some modelling.
However I find it...meh, bit...plasticky. It's good, but not for me.

But, Vue's much more fun to use IMHO, and that's crucial. I bought Lightwave as it's the only "High end" app who's interface doesn't make me want to do the Pogo Dance on the developer's gonads, lol. Lightwave's UI still sucks and puts  me off learning it, meh.

I started with Bryce, pleasure of use is the MOST important thing IMHO, these programs are just tools, like brushes, pencils etc. It's no use working in a medium you hate, as you can't relax enough to enjoy, which defeats the whole thing.

I only use Poser6 as I didn't see great need to update, Poser6 imports well :) Just turn off "export binary morph targets" when saving the Poser file.