Here I am again with another stupid question. XD What's with the rings of light first of all? They always show up in every render I do. And as for the mysterious black holes magically appear on certain terrain props that I have when I do more advanced renders. How do those appear? One more question. Is it a Windows Vista thing? I have poser 6 on my other computer with the Windows XP operating system and have never had this happen. Does anyone know what all of this is about and how to fix it?

Unless someone knows exactly what you mean, we would need to see a render to be able to take a guess what the problems might be. Please attach an image. I think the size limit is 200kBytes.

hmmm... This is off topic, but this picture reminds me of the graphics from Ocarina of Time. XD

This looks like self-shadowing due to the terrain geometry, possibly from Ambient Occlusion.
Do you get these artifacts if you switch off raytracing? (try a small area render).

Are you using Ambient Occlusion on an IBL light? Or on any lights?
If so, I would suggest try increasing the Bias setting bit by bit and see if it makes a difference.

(edit) what about the rings of light? I don't see any.

It only happens when raytracing is involved, and yes I am using Ambient Occlusion. If you look very closely to the right side of the tree, you might see the light rings.

I will try that. Thanks for the help.

It's very difficult to see what you mean by the light rings, but I'm guessing you mean the slightly different shades of grey on the darker part of the background?

If that is what you mean, I think it's due to a small variation of tone over a large area. Because there are limited colour values available (in greyscale 256 from black to white), small variations over a large area can only be represented by adjacent bands of different shade.

Unfortunately, the human eye (or rather, brain) plays a trick on you by accentuating the contrast between one band and the next: it makes each band appear darker where it adjoins the lighter shade, and lighter where it adjoins the darker shade. So it looks like you have light and dark bands across that area.

You can eliminate this with some blur in postwork, or in the render with a bit of Gaussian post-filter, or on the background material shader by adding a little noise.

By the way, in case you are not familiar with it, I meant the Bias setting in the Scene AO options, which you can open on the Properties palette for your AO light.

Alright, thanks. XD

Lemon shaped black spots is a well-known Poser render bug since P6 (at least). It appears on some surfaces when using raytracing (AO can trigger this, but you get it also without AO), and it's hard to get rid of. Playing with the lights' or AO's shadow Bias, as IsaoShi said, is the usual way of getting rid of them, at a cost though, for it makes your shadows/AO look less realistic...  :-(

What I do, when I don't get too many of those black lemons, is to render a partial render without whatever triggered it (AO or raytraced shadows), and use that patch to postwork the problem.

It's something I'd love to see taken care of...