Good Morning all, I've been playing around with my new copy of Carrara 7 (via 3dArtist magazine) and have run into a bit of a snag. I'm working on a figure render and all of a sudden whenever I maneuver in the Assembly room (pan, rotate, zoom), the cpu usage spikes to 100%, causing a minor pause after each operation.

This in and of itself would not be such a big deal (inured by years of Poser use), but the real problem occurs whenever I try to manipulate the figure itself. Rotating a shoulder for instance, causes the same spike, but it lasts much longer, so long in fact that real-time feedback on posing the figure is impossible.

My own troubleshooting leads me to believe that this is related to either my once having had a particle system in the scene (since deleted, playback set to 0) or that I'm saving textures in-scene, but I can't be sure. Needless to say some outside insight would be most appreciated.

Scene Specs:
Medium Size
4 Lights: 3 spots, 1 distant
One Figure: V4(morphs++, utopia, elite skin shader) with prop hair

System Specs:
Quad Core i5 2.43ghz
4gb RAM
GTS 260 w/512mb

I take it you have removed unused objects and shaders from the scene via the edit menu?  Try doing a HD cleanup.  and see how many old temp files it gets rid of.  I have had the same problem with 7 before I went up to 8.  Usually these steps clear it up.  Oh yes, almost forgot, do a full reboot of the system after you clean up the temp files to make sure there isn't something stuck in memory.  It does happen. 

It seems the temp files was at least partially to blame, deleting them sped up the scene maneuvering, but the figure manipulation problem remained. I've since rebuilt the scene "brick by brick" and it's a much smoother experience. I'm not sure what I did but that old file was clocking in at 217 megs whereas the rebuilt scene is topping off at 40. Thanks for the suggestions though, I had forgotten about the "remove unused..." commands, I'm sure they'll come in handy when I really start to get complex scenes going.

I have had the same issue before.  It's like sometimes when you resave your project (.car file) after removing objects, it doesn't completely remove them when it resaves so all the old junk that you think is gone, really isn't gone from the saved .car file.  So the next time you load it, it's slow and huge.