Well I'm glad Ockham has noticed these strange files.

I expect it is possible that I could supply enough information for someone to come up with an answer, but it has taken several weeks now of SM trying to help and it has got nowhere. I do not have weeks, or even months of free time to spare, or the knowledge, to try out fixes. All my driver and system files were updated before installing P8, I run only Firefox, and never have Vista UAC activated. SM got me to strip my computer payload right down to bare bones in diagnostic mode and Poser still didn't work at the speed of Poser 7, nor did my system recover.

Has anyone considered that although xml files are 'harmless', if they are being used as a part of the library indexing they might be imposing a huge strain on RAM and the system. I don't know, all I know is that they certainly weren't there in previous versions of Poser or they would have shown up in CCleaner. Oh, and something else I forgot to mention, CCleaner also showed that when P8 is running it generates a hell of a lot of thumbnail cache files too, also none of which show up when using Poser 7. My computer spec is safely within the 'preffered' sales description, but I don't think it can cope with all these extra files.

Thank you all for your offers of help, but in my position would you be happy to give up everything and all your time for several weeks, and put up with a malfunctioning OS, just to sort out 'one' program? I'd like to meet the overworked graphic designer who would happily say "Yes"!