Just tried running Poser 8 instead of Poser 7, for a bit.  It promptly started the drive grinding - the quality of which sounds kind of like the noise the old Windows ME disk defragmenter  used to make.  Kind of choppy, not continuous, as with the drive noise made by some programs.  Not sure how else to describe it....

What I noticed this time, in addition to the grinding, is a massive, continuous RAM leak.  Over roughly ten minutes I watched P8 grab 100 MB more RAM than it was using upon loading my test scene (two Antonias with default texture maps, two simple garments with small textures) being opened.  It continued to leak RAM when I wasn't doing anything.  It released any RAM grabbed during a render, but continued to consume more just for the scene. 

I tried turning off separate process rendering, but it didn't seem to make any difference for anything.

Smith Micro seems to want to blame most problems on display drivers and have suggested the cure-all of switching to SREE3D preview.  I did so, and Poser 8 behaved the same way - grinding the drive, not antialiasing, leaking RAM, refusing to operate the morph brush.  SREE3D does not seem to help.  (Does this mean my problem is something other than the display drivers?)

I tested not using nHancer, or, indeed, a special profile for Poser in the nVidia control panel (I deleted the profile altogether).  This didn't seem to affect anything, except insofar as Poser 8 went back to the aliased preview.  ("Aliased" is correct, right?  Not the unwieldy "unantialiased"....)  The RAM leak and grinding continued.

All drive grinding, as before, ceased promptly upon closing Poser 8.  In checking the Windows Task Manager for active processes which might account for the grinding, I only noted drive activity with Poser 8 and Windows Explorer.  Explorer's RAM consumption fluctuated up and down around a consistent level.  Poser, as described, grabbed more and more RAM while it was open.

After all of this, I opened the same scene I'd used, now in Poser 7.  P7 used approximately the same amount of RAM as P8, upon opening the scene.  The drive didn't grind.  The RAM used by Poser stayed level.  The preview window antialiased - without using an external program!  The morph brush didn't jump.

Something funny is going on, and it looks like it can only be traced to Poser 8, so far.  Bummer.

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Cage can be an opinionated jerk who posts without thinking.  He apologizes for this.  He's honestly not trying to be a turkeyhead.

Cage had some freebies, compatible with Poser 11 and below.  His Python scripts were saved at archive.org, along with the rest of the Morphography site, where they were hosted.