Hborre, so sorry! I was just reviewing and realized I totally missed your posts and settings screenshots on page three!  I'm going to have to start over as I didn't see the settings changes you made to your regular manual settings page, so I only made changes within the D3D page. Sorry about that, I must have jumped over to page 4 thinking that's where your newest post began. I would think that my not implementing those other changes first before changing the D3D settings gave me different results. That, plus not using the VSS.

I've still not found out which poser folder to unzip the four D3D upgrade files to, there's no documentation for installation on that website, just support links which mostly point here for help.

As for the VSS, I have my "other" runtimes setup on my external HD, so I assume I'll be setting up a separate runtime folder for VSS much the same as I've done for Kids 4 and V4. Then I unzip the files to that location in order as per the instructions? (See Pic)

Sorry about all the questions, surprisingly, I am understanding a good chunk of this, and I very much appreciate the help, it's just that some of this is waaaay over my head!  I'm hanging in here though because I do want to get all this to work, it's very important that I do. Don't know how soon I'll get it all figured out as tonight my pc time is going to be scattered, but will at least try to get the programs installed and the rest tomorrow & hopefully I'll be able to try out some renders at that point.

Thanks again

MM