Quote - Hi, softcris.  I visited the site you've linked, and it leads to the Hitachi website, where there are no .wav files readily evident.  I think they must have been taken down?  But I'll see if I can find anything which will assess the health of my hard drive.  I hadn't considered the possibility that I might be having hardware problems.  All of my other software runs fine.  Only Poser 8 has problems.  Posers 5 and 7 are quite cooperative.

I suppose it could be Runtime bloat, if that's actually something which can create problems in P8.  I really don't have very large libraries, but I do have several Runtimes linked up.  And, again, Poser 7 has all of those Runtimes, minus the new one for P8 (to which I haven't added any new content), and it runs without any trouble at all.

The grinding noise isn't anything unusual.  Apparently Vista grinds the drive this way a lot.  I hate it, I can't make it stop, and now Poser 8 seems to have run afoul of this wretched trait of MS Vista.  Hmm.

Thank you.  :D

It sounds to me like you have nowhere near enough system RAM and both Poser and Windows Vista are forced to use the virtual memory cache on your hard drive. The drive gets thrashed as it swaps files constantly. You should have at least 2GB of RAM just to run Vista well and if you're going to render scenes with a lot of objects and textures, you should strongly consider upgrading to 3GB or 4GB.