What's happening, by the sounds of it, is you're trying to do something that exceeds the limits of your version / machine, etc, and in fact the program is apparently handling that state of excession and telling you, within reason, what the problem is...?

In my book, as a program behaviour, that's fair enough.

This is quite an old version of Poser you're using now too...

Sure, I'd hope that Maya would also effectively handle such error conditions and tell you what the matter is... certainly for the kind of money it retails at.

But its worth noting that some programs, including some very expensive high-end programs, will simply crash out altogether and exit, without managing to do any kind of error handling, when there is a memory excession issue like this...

I've never used a version of Poser prior to Poser 9 (I've now sidegraded to Pro 2012) and I've never experienced this issue (even on my previous Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM machine).

As I understand it there is quite a lot of new stuff in Poser 9/2012, over Poser 8/2010... featurewise.

But there will also be substantially more, I suspect, in the way of performance and stability enhancements... which seems to be what your core concern is here?

Cheers ;-)