The first month I had P8, it worked great! Then i made the dumbastic decision to install the latest SR. Why? Aw hell... who knows:P  Anyway, about 3 or 4 days after the sr2.1 install, I noticed a severe lack of response from the library when clicking things. Typical scenerio: double-click a figure to load, wait about a minute, double-click again, wait for the 'not responding' shit to go away, double-click again and.....finally, it loads! Also, another really cool thing is how the folder counts show a ? more than anything else. Furr shurr!   ;)

Here's what I've tried so far:

*Uninstalled Poser 8
*Updated the nVidia 8800GT drivers (the old ones went back to 2006!)
*Defragged the poser hard drive (which is separate from the Vista drive)
*Reinstalled Poser 8
*Rebooted computer BEFORE opening P8

Now when I open P8, I have to wait a minimum of 75 seconds before I can do anything (mainly because the library is still loading or the damn ?'s are still there).
Is there anything that I've missed? Anything else to update?

Please offer some guidance here, as my P7 currenty kicks the crap out of P8. Nevermind IDL or faster render times. If I have to spend twice as much time just setting up a scene, then P8 is useless...

I feel your pain.

The best (free) advice I can give you is, before you close poser, collapse all the library folders to the top level. That way, when you open poser again, I'll finish loading a little quicker. However, when you expand a library again, it'll read through it, building folder counts. Just wait for it to finish then go about your business. It'll still be a bit of a chore to work with at first.

The best (non-free) advice I can give you is to grab a copy of D3D's XL Library script. It's not a perfect solution (you can't undo anything you add from the library with it, you'll have to manually delete) but it's a hell of a lot faster than poser's library.

What I'd like to know is; is it really necessary to count folder items? Does knowing how many things are in a particular folder increase poser's usefulness in any substantial way? Is there some technical reason for that? If so, can't the reading of folder contents be delayed until the folder is accessed?

I recall bagginsbill mentioning a proposed change in the library function along the lines of storing library contents in a database, that would greatly increase library performance, but that sounds like it mike take a while to materialize. Here's to hoping for changes for the better in SR3.

I second the XL script.......Steve

This free alternative may be of interest to you.

http://www.philc.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2922

Attached Link: http://neocron.lunarpages.com/library

You might check that you have all of your Internet Explorer patches installed via Windows Update. 

The Library didn't work for me at all after installing SR2.1; updating to IE 7 did the trick.  I have never tried IE8, so I can't comment on its behavior...

I've looked at all the suggestions, and I STILL think PzDB is the best alternative. It has the database, and allows you to determine what gets linked to what.
http://market.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=74462&keyword=pzdb

I had exactly the same problem which went from that anoyance to a nightmare.  Now I have no library.  Happened out-of-the-blue.  This is a powerful pc [corei7] which is almost never put online - and then only for occasional windows updates.  No firewall or antivirus other Vista.

I have been working with SM tech support and we must have traded at least 30 emails over the past week.  I have tried virtually everything & still no library.  Tech support has been very responsive, but no solution. 

Been booting in Diagnostic mode & turning off everything that comes with start up.  Been dumping all kinds of files & forwarding them.  Nothing.  Been learning quite a few things about Vista, but no results.

I fear the next thing is they will ask me is to reload the OS.  Uggh.  Still have a few things to try.

Thanks for responding everyone! I was starting to think it was just me with this problem. And like ecccoman, my poser machine only sees the internet for vista service updates (about once every 6 months). Likewise, no firewall or AV and the Aero/UAC crap got shut down 5 minutes after I booted Vista for the first time ;)  I'm gonna try upgrading IE first, then see about PhilC's gadget. Either way, I'm going to be hard pressed to pay another cent just to get this sad excuse for a $250 rendering program to act the way it should!

 i have xl script but ike semidieu's better at rdna - library manager - 
love esther
ps can select + conform all things in a folder at once

I've got a question...... I'm using DimensionXL it's great, but it has one major flaw, it depends on the p8 library the add or remove libraries. You still need the P8 library to add runtimes and that I'm very unhappy with that.

Do any of the proposed libraries bypass the P8 library completely? Or do they still rely on it and need you to add or remove runtimes though the p8 library?

 no - semidieu's one still requires one to load the libraries in poser 8.  Saying that he has a script to load them all at once from a folder of libraries.
Love esther

You can edit the library_prefs.xml by hand if you don't want to or can't use Poser's library to do that. But you'll have to do that while Poser is not running, as it writes to that file when closing, so Python scripts inside Poser cannot change the added runtimes without talking to Poser the same they as the library does, if they don't want to crash Poser in order for Poser to keep the changes. I don't think any of the Python libraries talk to Poser like Poser's library but rather use the Python methods - that's why they don't have undo, too.

OK, having similar problems.  I'm using the latest Nvidia drivers but P8 MAY get to changing the ?s to numbers after several hours.  when you click on a folder marked ? P8 is too without AI to even read the content it just opens an empty folder view. :(
P8 isn't an upgrade it's a downgrade.  P7, Carrara, Bryce, and even DAZ/Studio all work better when it comes to handling content.
What was so wrong with the way P7 handled content.  Sure it took a bit of time when you went to a new library but it didn't try to read through all of them on startup and it DID always succeed in reading them.

You have to wait until it has scaned all the directories! A ? means the directory is not yet scanned. So get a cop of coffee or tee while the directories are being scanned :)
If it really take hours to scan, I will suggest you look for another library to use like Advanced Library for Poser.

Great idea except that I've been going over the boards for about 1 hour and it still hasn't scanned the whole of it's miniscule base folder.