Thanks all. I saw another thread related to this and someone suggested getting Cacheman from ZDNet. I did and now I have 4 Vicki's in the scene with only occassional crashes. (I'm doing a Vicki intensive render for the gallery.) I haven't tried rendering it with all 4 yet, just with 3 and it works beautifully. I was really surprised! I'll probably have to save different versions of the PZ3 with only 2-3 Vics in each, render them all & then paste together in PSP. But at least I can compose the scene now without too many crashes. Thanks again for your help.