The problem I had with Vista and Poser in this case was not so much a performance issue as a situation where one program (outlook connector) blocked Poser.

This seems to happen under certain conditions only, since no-one else seemed to have this problem with the outlook connector and it also did not happen consistently. The two programs have no connection at all so it might be a bug in the OS. One other case where it happened with (if I recall correctly) was with firefox or one of its plugins. But many people use firefox and the problem does not happen to them.

If you want to find out what it is and you are technically up to the task: On the microsoft site there is a program called Process Explorer. With it you can look in all the process information of any program. If you load the program and Poser is stalled, you can find out which DLL's are communicating with external DLL's and what their status is. In my case a Poser process was waiting for a dll from the Outlook Connector. When I closed Outlook, the process was released and Poser continued.

So while it might not be Outlook which is causing the problem, it might give you a clue what other program (if any) is blocking Poser.