This may or may not have already been addressed but I NEED help with P7 crashing.  I have been using P7 for a while now without any problems whatsoever up until yesterday.  I had to reinstall my system (Windows Vista Premium), and while that all went off without a hitch, it was time to reinstall Poser.  I did so, and restored my runtime, ran Poser and it seemed fine until about an hour or so in to my session, Poser locked up, crashed and I got the default answer from Windows about Poser.exe has stopped working.  Of course, I was upset, so I closed it and rebooted (to be safe).  Went back into Poser and this time, it crashed much sooner.  Since this event, I have:

Uninstalled Poser
Reinstalled Poser (including re-downloading ALL patches, SRs, etc.)
Ran Poser with everything set to default

It crashed again, just by opening a default figure...

I went to E-Frontier and read about the Poser preference file and how it may become corrupt, so I deleted the files and re-ran Poser again...

crashed again...

I wrote to E-Frontier and got an instant reply from Smith Micro about them addressing the issue and to check the forum, so i click on their link and I was taken to a forum that had nothing to do with Poser.

I am, to say the least, very frustrated.

I have a legal copy of Poser, running the latest drivers from Nvidia for my 8500GT series video card.

Hopefully, someone can help me out.

Did you try switching from hardware preview to sreed? Could be a videocard/driver issue of some kind.

If you switch to sreed preview, and things are working properly, then the issue IS your videocard/drivers, and about the only thing you can do is try different version drivers, and if that doesn't work, just either stick with sreed, or buy a new videocard.

I'd have thought any problem with the OpenGL would show up immediately, in the way the screen refreshed itself.   I recently had to switch to Vista from XP.   On the XP, some video driver updates worked fine with OpenGL and others were hopeless, but I don't think I ever suspected the hardware preview of causing any of the (actually rather rare) crashes in Poser 7.

After installing Poser 7 on Vista, things seemed to work fine for a few days, until I tried to start Poser and received, during start-up, the useless message to the effect that Poser had stopped working.   If I start Poser (and Vue, which had the same problem) by right-clicking and selecting "Run as administrator", the programme seems to run without a hitch.   I think that there is also a permanent way of setting this.    I wonder if that will also work in this case.

(I should add that, as far as I was aware, my userid, as the only one on the computer, already was the administrator.   That doesn't seem to make any difference.)

Thanks for your input folks.  As I stated before, my pc ran Poser just fine up until this latest reinstall of my system.  What I found was that I had forgotten to update my video card drivers after the reinstall (went to Nvidia to get the drivers and NOT let Windows Update find them for me), so I did that but of course, i still had probs with crashing, so i actually found a snippet at E-Frontier about doing a "clean" reinstall of Poser, which meant running my machine with a limited startup, uninstall and reinstall of Poser w/latest updates, reboot to normal startup and now, things seem to work just fine.  I think what the other prob was, is that before I reinstalled my system, I backed up my Runtime and I think something in my runtime was causing a conflict of some sort.  I didn't copy my runtime back to avoid issues but I did spend the greater part of my afternoon reinstalling content...what a pain the butt.  I ran Poser after I installed a "limited" amount of content, just to see what was up (some of the content consisted of the new V4.2) and things were stable.  I left my prefs at default, so i will do more trouble shooting this eve as in changing my prefs in Poser and installing more content.

Thanks again for the suggestions.