this past christmas I got P7 full for my mac. I was thrilled to pieces but i'm really not all that happy with it.

I get weird lag i guess. I don't know what to call it. But say I try to spin a dial, it will hang, instead of scroll smoothly through the numbers.

And sometimes I get weird clipping problems in Preview depending on my focal length. Everything renders fine, but the process of actually setting up a character, or scene, is so time consuming because of the extra time lost trying to spin dials, or arrange the camera.

I have a 2.4 core 2 duo iMac with 4GB ram, and a 256mb HD2600 Radeon video card.

Is there any type of options/optimization I can do to lessen this type of lag? I don't experience it at all on my PC but the PC is needed for other stuff while i'm posering.

Make sure everything is up to date, including your Mouse Drivers. There have been some reported issues with Mouse Drivers from others on a MACs (or issues with mouse pointers)

I uninstalled my Driver and am using the default MAC Mouse Driver, since I had conflicts with the Trackball and the Wacom Tablet.

I am not sure if this is your issue, but it is worth looking into.

 My Mac runs Poser with some quirks that I just ignore. The image export icon has it's tiling set to u 0.5, v 0.5; spinning dials don't work until I click into the field, punch in a number THEN spin the dial. I don't spend much time in Poser so I personally don't care, even though I didn't have these issues in Windows.

On the other hand, the Mac experience has been blissful, and I'm required to make my standard "Mac is running UNIX underneath the GUI" comment.

 i'm using Logitech VX revolution mouse with the newest Logitech Control Center. 

Ive tried to ignore the quirks. I can't ignore them anymore. They get on my nerves and makes me not even want to open poser.

So any other suggestions on how I can  alleviate this problem ?

it doesn't happen with the wired USB mighty mouse that came with the imac?

 I haven't ever used the mighty mouse. I can't stand it :/

I use a Logitech wireless mouse together with a USB Wacom tablet on an iMac with OS X 10.4. I have a few niggling problems with the Poser GUI, but not like yours.

Since everyone's experience is slightly different, I can only conclude that it's caused by compatibility issues with certain drivers. In my opinion this means it's unlikely that they will ever be resolved, since SM just don't have the budget to perfect the UI for all possible hardware / drivers.

I guess what I'm saying is that if you really want Poser to work better, you are going to need to invest a little time (and a little dosh, maybe) in trying different things to first pinpoint and then eliminate the cause of these problems. For a start, perhaps you could uninstall the Logitech mouse driver and try the basic Apple mouse, if only to see whether anything changes.

Now, regarding your preview clipping problems.... can you post a screenshot of what you mean? It could be a graphics driver issue, but it may be just the normal preview image clipping you sometimes get if the camera viewing range is left at the default setting and you move it closer to the figure, for example. If it is this, adjusting the near and far (hither and yon, I think) settings will usually sort it out for any given camera position.

I nearly always need to increase my main camera's near distance to remove clipping and apparent (but not real) clothes poke-through on a figure in the mid distance.

My Poser works fine. I  used to get the slow dials with Poser 6 a lot but not with 7. Weird clipping can happen sometimes but you can nomally get around it by switching to the scree preview rather than the OpenGL. Most times it doesn't bug me but sometimes it is there, for sure.

next time one sees lag in trying to spin the poser dials, check activity monitor.  I daresay one will see excessive page-ins/page-outs and possibly even network activity.

 Well I didn't always have this mouse, but I've always had the lag problem. So I doubt its the logitech driver issue. For quite awhile logitech's control center wasn't even compatible with Leopard, so I didn't bother installing it.

switching to SreeD does stop the clipping but it also slows down some. I turned on Fast Tracking and it helps the camera movement, even though it turns everything into a box temporarily.

Miss Nancy, is there any reason why it would be doing PI/PO and network activity while spinning dials? some way to stop it?

It's more accurate to say spinning dials isn't even possible. I drag and it may go up .2 points. So I end up just typing in values out of frustration.

I've toyed with a few PREVIEW rendering settings but I still have not really fixed anything :/

tried:
using a cord mouse instead of bluetooth - same dial lag. uninstalling the CC and seeing if there's a difference.

also, no page ins page outs while trying to spin dials.

 magnets are part of the SUPER lag in dials :/

I pretty much always have a magnet somewhere in my scene. i tried a fresh scene, just V4 + morphs and it dialed ok. i could see the #s move anyways.

So I guess its magnets causing most of the problem. Any way to stop that then? is there any particular part of the computer i should focus on upgrading when I do go to upgrade? I dream of a Mac Pro but if i'm still going to get this goofy lag after spending that much $ on a machine, i'd rather not...

Just to throw in .02

I run Poser 5, 6, & 7 on 3 Macs

P7 on G4 PPC Mac - ( OSX 10.5.5 - Sonnet DP 1.6 Proc, 2 gig Mem, ATI Radeon 9000 Pro) Lag, sputter, snooze, and spinning beachballs from hell. P6 runs better (smoother) on this machine.

eMac - OSx 10.4 Same as above

P7 on iMac 20" -  OSX 10.5.5- runs great, still get an occasional hiccup but for the most part it's more than acceptable. P6 runs the same as P7 performance wise.

It is my understanding, the better performance on iMacs, has to do with Mac Native vs. Mac Universal coding. (I do not know if it's FACT, but I notice a HUGE difference in operation between PPC and Intel base) 

On an InTel Mac Pro with 16 gigs of ram using Poser Pro. When a scene starts to get heavy, I either switch the SreeD, change to fast preview mode or start hiding characters and or props I have set up and I am done with to prevent the redraw lag.

On one big scene I even went so far as to set up the right side. Save the Cr2, then worked for days on the left after I deleted the right side figures and props. Then when I was happy with the left I imported the right side back in and rendered in queue. Could not get it to render in background without crashing.

vex, in answer, there is no reason for excessive pageins/outs on a properly programmed 64-bit OS with 4 GB of physical RAM and 10 GB of contiguous free space on the boot drive, with a properly programmed 64-bit app installed and running on the boot drive.  in regard to network activity, the main focus of OS X security breaches has been real or phony apps accessing the internet, some of which may have been written to defeat or fool security software (e.g. little snitch).