So at $49 I thought, "Why not get Bryce 7Pro?" Iv'e been playing around and been caught three times by a bug in the materials lab. I'll decide to use an image as a material. I click on the little ball and get the window with the moon and leo to come up. I click on the next empty square and get the browse window to come up. I start navigating to my pictures and suddenly I hear the drive start to click. Immediately the browse window disappears though I haven't selected an image. I pop back to the materials window but it's frozen like it's still waiting for input. I minimize the bryce window hoping to find the browse window hiding. I try to close the materials window and either nothing happens or windows eventually pops up saying the following: Bryce7 is unresponsive. Do you want to close the program or wait for the window to respond?

Heck no! stupid me hasn't saved in four hours. I added fifteen things. I want to save this puppy.

So bring up Windows task manager. In the Processes tab find the image name dwm.exe and end this process. The materials window in Bryce responds again. I get back to the main window and save under a new name promptly.
 
I can go back into the materials window and add the image texture. Sometimes it works and sometimes it freezes again. The longer I leave the browse window open the greater the chance it will lock up.

 I'd file a bug report at DAZ on this...not very friendly behaviour.. ...

I've had the same issue.  Bryce 7 has some nice features but is buggy.  Hopefully some updates will be forthcoming from DAZ!

I think I just found another bug. Importing new mats to the materials catalogue crashes B7.

Attached Link: other thread

Here's another

How anout making a sticky on Bryce 7 bugs, where people can report bugs, and evtually workarounds for them - just to have it in one place :-)

/arne

dwm.exe is the Windows Desktop Manager that is present in Vista and Win 7.

How much video ram do you have?
How much system ram do you have?

AS I think that's exactly it. I have been runing Vista on only 2G ram. I think the drive noise is windows throwing stuff into a swap file because it's out of memory. Just got back from my brother in laws with another 2Gb stick of ram. I can open my music folder now and all the images show instead of it taking a minute to load. I'll try to crash Bryce again and let you know if I suceed or fail.

Well that didn't take long. I started with a blank scene and clicked leonardo. The browse window came up and I pulled down to change out of the directory I was in. The window hung for about 15 seconds then the directory tree popped down. Immediately I hear click-click from the drive and the window disappears. The materials window with the moon and leonardo is up but nothing works.

I go into task manager and kill dwm.exe. Suddenly the browse window appears over the leonardo window and works again. I go to the Bryce legacy bilboards and load the first hut image sucessfully. Materials windows disappear and I'm back at Bryce desktop with a bilboard hut loaded.

Well, glad to hear you got it to work, but of course disappointed that this problem exists. But, stay positive, a lot of work is going on to make Bryce 7 work better with available ram. I hoping and betting that this problem of yours will be history one day. And, it needs to be since many people are on either Vista or Windows 7, and only more and more will be.

 So electroglyph, did ya post a DAZ bug report? Seems a good idea.. ...