I think, I have found an explanation for the "lots of XML files" problem described at the start of this thread (by ockham, bevans84 et al.) and a workaround.

Internet Explorer stores the temporary internet files in subfolders of "UserDir/local settings/temporary internet files/content.IE5" (don't bother about "IE5" - this is historical). You can see the "temporary internet files" folder only, if you have turned on option "show hidden and system files" in Windows Explorer. But even then "content.IE5" and its subfolders remain hidden!

There is a little trick to make these folders visible: copy "temporary internet files" into another directory. In this case the copy is treated by Windows as a simple folder, and you can see everything in it.

When running Poser, new subdirectories containg a lot of XML files (and some others) are created within "temporary internet files". I could prove that by cleaning "temporary internet files" directory (see below), then starting Poser, placing Alyson Casual into an empty scene and then closing Poser (without saving). This simple operation generated a subdirectory containing 192 files!

As cspear has stated, Poser uses some components of Internet Explorer. I suppose, the generation of all these files are an unwanted side effect caused by these IE components.

This is also an explanation, that only people, who do not use IE for browsing (like me) are having problems: IE limits the cache size and deletes files when this limit is reached. But if you never run IE, no cleaning is done! So I have once reached a maximum of more than 40,000 files occupying more than 150 MB of disk space!

The workaround I suggest is to run IE from time to time and to clean the browser cache (delete temporary files). That worked for me.

But I hope, that the programmers of Poser will find a solution to overcome this strange effect.

(I made the tests with Poser 8.0.1.10434 and IE 8 under Windows XP SP 3)