I just sent this message off to Vue customer support, I hope it helps someone else that has not had good stability with Vue 7.4 and Mac OSX.

I have had serious crashes with Vue 7.4 including all recent and current updates. The software would freeze and cause the entire OS to freeze up. The only solution had been to turn the computer off and restart it cold. I have seemed to find a solution that has not resulted in a crash in over 2 hours with Vue 7.4 Mac OS. Crashes were common during any terrain function editing and then some would be irregular with no pattern. My solution so far has been to set the program to open using Rosetta. This has so far given my run of tests including prolonged rendering with no crashes at this time. Please forward this information to technicians.

Please post your findings.  Hopefully this is a shaft of light in the direction of the current problems with Vue 7.4 stability on Mac systems.

 I able to do all kinds of terrain editing, rendering, material editing, full-on ecosystem load and then render with no crashes so far.  Anyone try this?  Just go to the program icon for the application, right click then click 'get info' - then click the box next to 'open using rosetta'.

I was even finally able to complete quadspinner's terrain tutorial.

Wow, this is the most recent version? If that actually fixes anything, it means they are compiling it for non-intel machines. Maybe you got the wrong version somehow? Most products properly choose the correct binary at loadup. so, maybe this is just a bug in their build process. I can't imagine that they haven't switched their builds to properly include intel. Did you possibly grab the files that were originally installed on a power-PC mac?

When I look at vue 6 app, (I don't have 7:( ) it says it's universal...so, either your installation got messed up, they had a goof with a recent update, or you just lucky and received a weird copy!

This is actually very similar to an issue I was having with my Mac Pro at the office - everything is working ok (or as good as 7 on a Mac gets), and midway through trying to build a scene, something simple as loading a material or adding a primitive kicks off the spinning beachball and then the entire system goes down - no control, can't force quit anything or switch apps. This is the only app that I've ever had take down OSX and require a forced restart which is a feat in and of itself, but it's only on that one machine, making me think it's a hardware conflict specific to that Mac.

That's great if this trick is working for you, but I can't imagine they would be compiling a non-universal version, though I guess they could have a botched installer or something... the same installers have been used on all of my machines and just the one has the big freeze problem.

See my thread here and my results.

www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

The latest 7.4 version did fix two issues for me I was having. At this time, I have no problems with crashes at all, especially on exit or with the "cloud layers" as before. Check my signature for system specs. If you have the latest Mac Leopard OS build 10.5.8 and the latest 7.4 patch, it should be fine.