Well, yesterday was one of those days I should have stayed in bed.  I lost a button on my pants at the doctor's office, while having a prostate exam.  Thank God I had a belt; my gut and my belt were the only things holding up my pants.  At work, my workstation crashed twice in less than 8 hours.  I went home, got online, and decided to buy PoserPro.  I then downloaded my purchases from CP, and was anxious to install them.  PoserPro hung up during extraction, and crashed my machine.  I downloaded to my backup machine, and everything extracted fine, however it choked during install, and hard crashed my backup machine.  It did not come back, so I reformatted and re-installed XP home on my backup machine.  I finally got PoserPro installed on my main machine.  Since I bought the upgrade, I tried to enter my P7 serial number in the appropriate box, but I couldn't enter anything in the box, so I just installed as normal.  I started PoserPro, got the splashy screen, and it crashed and crashed, and crashed.  I uninstalled and re-installed it, and everything seemed to work.  While looking at the new items in PoserPro, Zone Alarm goes crazy and shuts down.  I immediately unplug the network cable, and Windows freezes hard.  Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing, so I hard reboot.  Windows tries to start, and then it goes to the CHKDSK screen.  Windows tells me I have a bad cluster- great.  The computer then reboots, pauses, and then gives me the blue screen of death.  I re-format the C and D drive partitions, and try to re-install windows.  Nada.  Well, I've just lost contact of all downloads and programs I had on my redundant backup partitions.  I hope there is a way I can hook the drive up as a slave, and pull all information off of it I need.  I' m typing this thread on my third-string dust-covered Dell emergency backup machine on its last leg.  I'm at the point that I'm ready to give up on computers and join a monestary!!! -A very frusterated Starkdog 

Been there done that..... bought the new Vista machine! :P

Vista, Quad Core, and Network Attached Storage sounds really good to me now.  Luckily, I was able to get my "newer" backup system running.  I'm in the process of re-partitioning the HD.  Even though the Partition Magic I have is outdated, it works greatly!!!

I only went Vista Dual Core with 3 gigs ram and 350 gigs hd because I'm a cheap bastage on a  budget! Got it for under $450 though so I'm happy.

The keyword here is ZoneAlarm. Ditch it. If you're behind a hardware router (cable or DSL modem) you don't need it anywa, it just screws up installs.
ALWAYS disable your virus checker during an install. Highly invasive virus checkers such as Norton or McAfee - ditch them. Go for a more OS-friendly system like Avast, Kaspersky, AVG or Trend Micro.

PoserPro runs like a dream on XP64 and Vista64 (Q6600/8GB and T7300/4GB)

SVDL,
There are so many choices now, it is confusing.  I'm typing this message on my old-as-dirt Dell P4 2.4Ghz with 256mb rambus machine.  It feels slow like a 386!!!  I'm doing Windows update on my newest machine, which is an HP a1540n.  It has an Athlon 64X2 processor, 2.0 Ghz and 2 Gb of ram.  Can I install Vista 64 on this?  I am so out of the loop on this, I feel really dumb. -Starkdog

It's an Athlon64, so its 64 bits. Vista 64 will install. 2.0 Ghz may not be the fastest Athlon on the block, and those 2 GB are meager for running Vista.

Installing a 64 bit OS would be worth it, especially if you upgrade your RAM to at least 4 GB. Depends on the mainboard whether that can be done. With a bit of luck, you have an AM2 version of the Athlon64, which means you can use DDR2, that's dirt cheap at the moment.

XP 64 bits might be a better idea. Less resource hungry than Vista 64 bits, but you may run into driver problems. If your graphics card is an ATI, you can forget about  XP 64 bits.