I just purchased Poser 8 and I am having 2 problems, the first one is every time I open Poser 8 it's making me re-add my serial number.  I have a legal copy, but it just won't stay in.  Has anyone else had this problem and if so is there a work around.

The second problem is that Poser isn't picking up all my items in my external hard drive.  When I hit refresh it always crashes the program, so any help will be very helpful to me.

Thank you 

You really need to contact SM support about this, possibly even telephone them during US/California business hours (7am US Pacific time).
http://my.smithmicro.com/support/index.html

Installation Assistance:
Difficulties installing software are normally the result of other applications running that can corrupt the installation process. If you require additional assistance installing your Smith Micro product, we can help.

• Phone: (949) 362-8461
• Email: techsupport@smithmicro.com

Hours of Operation:
7AM to 5:00PM Pacific Time Monday through Friday, except for Thursday when we open at 7AM and close at 3:00PM.

err ... oops, it's Saturday now isn't it.

Try loading poser on an internal hard drive and i don't it will corectly work on an external h.d

 I have Poser installed in the default location.  I have an extra Runtime on another hard drive.

your only meant to use externa hd's for backup copies of your work and not full programs

 I have an extra runtime in Poser 7 and it's fine, I've never had a problem  until P8.

**was there an upgrade or the full poser program?

i would have to agree with pjz99 waiting until monday and contact the company**

 I have the full install not an upgrade,  I sent them an email hopefully they will get back with me on Monday

i would try it on another external H.d and see if poser works if not then you know what the problem is

I am having this exact same problem..  The program crashes when I try to reload runtime files from My internal drive.  I am running OS 10.6 also..

Perhaps our runtimes are getting too large..!

Do you use another animation software truespace, 3ds max, maya etc? i use 3ds max and poser but they are on another hard drive 

reqirements poser 8

• Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5
• 700 MHz G4 processor (Intel Core Duo or 1GHz G4 or faster recommended)
• 512 MB system RAM (1 GB or more recommended)
• OpenGL enabled graphics card or chipset recommended (recent NVIDIA GeForce and ATI Radeon preferred)
• 24-bit color display, 1024 x 768 minimum resolution
• 2 GB free hard disk space (4 GB recommended)
• Internet connection required for Content Paradise
• Adobe® Flash® Player 9
• DVD-ROM drive (physical product only)

Poser 8 for Mac Digital Consist of 3 Large File Downloads
Poser 8 Mac (630.7 MB .dmg)
Poser 8 Content (1.91 GB .dmg)
Legacy Content (1.37 GB .dmg)

Contrary to what SM stated on their website, the library system of P8 does not work under 10.6. There is a memory allocation error (it was there in 10.5, and it is a lot worse under 10.6). Bring up your console and look in the console log not the crash reporter after P8 crashes from a library refresh and you will see lots of these entries.

9/4/09 8:16:03 PM    [0x0-0x17017].com.SmithMicro.Poser8[268]    Poser 8(268,0xb07b7000) malloc: *** error for object 0x5136590: pointer being freed was not allocated.

You can screw around and create a bunch of nested folders to get it to semi work. But who wants to do that and then put everything back after SR1 comes out. By nesting, I mean the further you move your content away for the top level of a category, there is a remote chance it will survive a refresh and not crash

Their pat answer is it worked on the last seed of 10.6 and not on the final release of 10.6. Which is a little far fetched, since it didn't work correctly under 10.5 either. Under 10.5 it crashed less after doing a refresh. But it still crashed a lot. Under 10.5 at least you got the right folder counts in a category and they displayed more or less with in reason that you could limp along and use the program under 10.5 while waiting for SR1. Once you jump to 10.6 and you have a big runtime you are dead in the water. If your runtime is small in content like the default P8 runtime (legacy content not added)  it will work to some degree under 10.6 if after a refresh of a smaller runtime if you watch the activity monitor and wait for the consumed CPU cycles to drop back into the 20 percent range or below before you do anything else. If you touch the library and the consumed CPU cycles are still above 20 percent, it will most likely crash under 10.6. One has to assume that OS X is smart enough to try to heal it's self from the memory pointer-allocation errors and you just have to wait to see if that will occur. Sometimes it doesn't, which means it is going to crash any second.

What I mean by small is each folder and sub folder in each category has to have less then approx 15 to 22 items in it. Go beyond that and you are dead.

The last thing I plan to try later today is reinstall P8. The 10.6 install removes a lot of older code, like some Java stuff, etc. I could struggle with P8 under 10.5 and then upgraded to 10.6. I want to try the reverse and do a clean install of P8 into 10.6 vs the upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6 on a working copy of P8. I don't hold out much hope that it will work. It is more of a curiosity thing on my part then anything else.

 Gary,

Thanks Hopefully there will be an upgrade to get it to work. I guess until then I will just use Poser Pro.  I really appreciate the explanation.

Thank you again

Beth

Yeah, have to use Poser Pro myself if I want to do anything and stay sane.

Have to say one thing to the Mac Poser 8 development team (if they have such a thing) "WTF! Wake up you idiots and pay attention to the console log! It's right there in front of your face if you would have been paying attention!"

 Monday's Labor Day. You may not receive a response until Tuesday.

The asking for the code over and over is a permission thing. Generally, you can get around it by Lanching Poser in Safe Boot.

 I finally got the serial number problem fixed but I still can't get the external files to all show up without crashing, so hopefully there will be a fix soon

Quote -  I finally got the serial number problem fixed but I still can't get the external files to all show up without crashing, so hopefully there will be a fix soon

What was the fix for the serial number problem? I am having the exact same problem, and SM are trying a lot of Permission Fix type things, but I’m not getting anywhere.

 Hairydalek,

Make sure you have permissions then the serial should work.  I finally got everything to work right with P8