Okay, well in reponse to the comments from all the people here, I've finally bitten the bullet and installed Windows 2000 on my main PC, overwriting my Windows 98 installation. I've resisted the move in the past because of the trouble getting Windows 2000 compliant versions of all the programs I use regularly... Anyway, having spent the afternoon downloading Win2k drivers for my hardware, and installing the operating system, I can say unequivocally that Poser runs VERY considerably better!!! In the course of my job as a computer journalist, I had already noticed a massive impovement in 3d performance with every single graphics card tested (I recently benchmarked 10 of them under 98 and Win2k using both OpenGL and DirectX benchmarking software - see my review in Computer Arts). This alone had been tempting me to make the change, but as I have had a generally good experience with Win98, the benefits didn't seem to outweigh the aggravation of upgrading. Now, I'm delighted to have made the switch. For my test image, I loaded the ornithopter (which I've never been able to render except on freshly booted machine), textured mike, untextured mike, textured demon, textured mikey, textured victoria and P4 man. The program still took as long (if not longer) than ever to load the characters, which was only to be expected, but the really excellent news is that the scene rendered first time, even with all these models and associated textures. This only goes to confirm, as far as I'm concerned, that it was the program's interaction with the Win98 memory system that is at fault. I did try manually setting virtual memory settings under 98, but this introduced additional instability to lots of other programs, and frankly, shouldn't be necessary. Anyway, I'm delighted that the program is now running well. I don't have as much memory as some of you power-hounds, but I'm now getting the sort of performance from the program that I've always felt I deserved. In addition, my other 3D apps and games run much faster. Thanks to everyone for your useful comments.