Yeah, I do too much multitasking, too, so maybe that's something to do with my problem as well. As for Poser seeming as if it is now working a little faster, maybe Vista is optimizing based on your use. It supposedly does that sort of thing over time, or so I read somewhere. I haven't noticed it yet, but then again I got so discouraged at the start (once I installed it after switching to Vista) I haven't been using Poser 7 very much lately.

As for best practices, you are likely to get better advice on that in the Poser forum, or at least I've seen that kind of thing discussed there a few times ...

Anyway, continued good luck.