A little follow up.

When I last spoke to SM about this issue, they seemed to indicate the build up of files (if it exists which they seemed skeptical of) happens, it would have little impact on system performance.

I beg to differ. I differ because of

(a) drive cluster size (1k stored on a 4k cluster drive (which is NTFS default) is taking up 4k.... not 1k.). So you may have 20,000 1k temp files that total 8 megs, but it can take up 70 or megs of drive space quite quickly.

(b) it's not an IE Cache or Firefox Cache issue exactly. Setting your IE cache to 8megs doesn't solve the problem, especially If you never run IE (like me).

This is my response to Tech:

I think you also found the reason why everone does not see this build up.. I only have 8MB of Cache on my system. if you do not have a large Cache, you will not see the build up. I have passed this on to the Project Team.<<

Well I have couple observations

1. The buildup of files can go way beyond the "Cache" limit of IE if IE is never run to effectively clean them out. For example I always have my IE limit set to 8 and Firefox to 0 (firefox doesn't use this same cache so it's not really relevant). Yet if IE is not run this cache can grow way up beyond 8 megs.

2. More importantly, because of the way the file sizes are (typically 1k) and because of the huge amounts of them, what I've noticed on various drive types and cluster sizes (NTFS and Fat and Fat32 trying various cluster sizes of 512bytes to 16kb) is that these files do not compress well even with drive compression turned on.

So while 20,000 1k or 2k files may add up to maybe 8 megs... that actual space they take up on a drive can be 50, 70, 90 megabytes because as you know, a 1k file stored under with a 4k cluster size takes up 4k.

THIS is why is DOES have a serious impact on performance. And disk fragmentation.

Now, as I said, the solution I've worked with using a 200 meg RAM drive. I've found that within 2 hours, 100 megs get gobbled up by these XML files. The actual size of the files is only about 10 megs or so but because of the issue above, it's take up huge amounts of space per session. If you don't run IE, they don't necessarily get cleaned out.

Why don't people see them? They are truly hidden, even with view system and OS files selected. You can only find them IF you know the random name of the folder within the temporariy internet files/ie5 folder.

I have spoken (via a message board) to the person who claims to be the "Quarterback" of this project. HE only realized last week he's getting the buildup as well. Right away all kinds of alarms and red whistles went off around me. This is a major problem. I'm not blaming The Poser 8 folk, but I'm not blaming the OS either. If there's any culprit it's Adobe product used to build this new interface in P8. P7 does not exhibit this issue. 

I'm truly convinced everyone's poser 8 writes these files. But not everyone notices them.