First step is disable the firewall. If it goes away, then its the firewall. Re-enable it and examine its settings.

Second step, as John pointed out, is that the preferences file can become corrupted due to a crash. If this happens, the configured ports may be nonsense, and the communication will fail.

I'm talking so far about a persistent reproducible failure as the OP encountered.

For intermittent failure, I don't know. I don't have intermittent failure and I can't reproduce it.

I have said before, and will say again. It is not possible to debug a problem using a Poser user as my eyes and hands. If you really want me to figure it out, you have to send me your computer. I have no doubt I can fix it. But that's not a workable solution.

So - what should we do?

I have run all the recent versions of Poser on 5 different computers - Win XP, XP Pro, Vista, Win 7, whatever, with all kinds of different versions of Flash, IE, on network, off network, etc. All work perfectly - never crash, never have a comms problem.

I am an expert at debugging problems, but if I'm blind and my hands are tied behind my back, I can't do a damn thing about it.

The only info I get is what users think is important to say. They often don't say things like "My firewall asked me if it was OK to let Poser on the Internet and I said no." In fact, I've had two people outright deny that they did that, when in fact, that is precisely what they did. Then they say "That's not important - it should work without the Internet." And it does work without the Internet. But that's got nothing to do with whether or not the firewall is blocking Poser from INTERNAL communication facilities. The firewalls use the word "Internet" when they actually mean "loopback TCP".

I'm not suggesting that's your situation - I'm just saying this is not an easy thing to debug when people filter the truth, either because they mistakenly decide some fact is not important, or they forget the actual facts.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)