I've encountered a problem I haven't seen before.  Poser 7 and 8 hang at the end of a render.  If I click anything, the programs crash.  I did some searching in the forum here and found the problem mentioned several times, so it's just new to me.  I never encountered it on my previous computer but it's happening very frequently on the new one.  Don't know why.  Also, there were a few times when, if  it didn't hang on the first render, it seemed to go on for hours without a hitch after that.

Has anyone found any clues as to why this happens?  Oh, and I did install SR2 this morning.  Poser 8 had one if its great marathon runs of perfect behaviour, but when I launched it later, it was hang, hang, hang.

Computers are fickle and it could be anything.  However I'll bet its your RAM.  Try this, before a major render, close Poser and reopen it again.  If you still have problems, turn your computer off for about 10 seconds (clears RAM).  RAM should clear when closing a program, but sometimes it doesn't.   Jan

Poser 8 also has an issue with some material nodes causing hangups and crashes.  I thought this was fixed with SR2.  At least it has been for Me..

it can be outlook?
Outlook did give some users problems, especially at the very end of a render..
Rebooting was (seems to be) te only solution. (min 10 seconds)
Did you have outlook open between the 2 poser sessions?

Thank you all for responding.  The first time I really noticed it, every single first render in either Poser 7 and/or Poser 8 hung.  I don't mind telling you I was really worried.  I kept closing and re-opening the programs (well I had to didn't I since they just froze) but the first render would hang.  So I decided to restart the computer, and that seemed to have had a positive effect, but it doesn't seem to be 100% reliable and I just wish I knew why it happened in the first place.

I thought about other programs running and causing conflicts.  I don't have Outlook, and usually only have Firefox and Thunderbird running at the same time...rarely Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3 too, but the most recent stalls were during sessions when the Adobe products were not active.  Just to satisfy my curiosity, I shut down Firefox and Thunderbird but the hang ups still persisted with Poser.

Luckily, the new computer reboots very quickly so restarting it is not quite the inconvenience that rebooting the previous computer was......is.

You did not say what OS it was, but if it is Windows/Vista/Windows 7 you can try the following to find out which program might interfere:
Go to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx en download process explorer. It is a replacement for the task manager. If you have the problem, start the program and select poser.exe, double click on it. If you do this, there is a tab which says "Threads". If you select that, you can see all the threads and also with which module or program they are communicating. If you see a "foreign" program there, it might be the one which is interfering.
If you close the interfering program, the render will finish. But once you start up this program again, the problem might come back - in this case you have to reboot the machine.

I sometimes have the same problem as you have (twice up to now) and I had to reboot the machine to get rid of the problem

Thank you winvdb.  That sounds like a very handy tool to have.  I'll try that.

Way too simple so I hesitate to mention it, but just for fun, next time it hangs, try relaunching Poser without closing it first.    Clears some hang-ups for me.

Quote - Way too simple so I hesitate to mention it, but just for fun, next time it hangs, try relaunching Poser without closing it first.    Clears some hang-ups for me.

I'll do it.  Thanks!