Quote - When you are referring to "updates on" do you mean in Posers "General Preferences" section under the "Misc" tab? ("Check for updates on launch"  this check box was checked).  If so, I need to uncheck this?

That's the setting I was referring to, and it should be unchecked.

I suspect that the cause of the problem is 2) as the line number in the error message is, IIRC, 2 for cause 1)

The other possibility is some of the Face room data installers can mess up another XML file.
This applies only to CL/EF/SM figures.
Other content will only cause problems if there are bad characters in directory names.

Did you try to see if one particular Runtime is responsible ?
Once we know which file Poser is having trouble with, we can attempt to work out why the problem is occuring.