I dont have zbrush. I have considered getting it now that a lot of other programs can be used with it. I have seen it in use and played around with it, and it looks like a nice program. 

You need to learn a lot of the keyboard shortcuts in Blender. Once you have them down you will be zipping around scenes. You do zoom, rotate view, etc with the mouse and a shortcut key. (Which is remappable and there are two shortcut key presets in Blender. (Blender and Autodesk))

Yes, there is a lot Blender can not presently do. Thats a given since it is a free program. But at the same time it will do more than some programs costing a lot of money. 2.66 has a lot more in it than 2.62, way more...

Also keep in mind that most of Blender is turned off when you install it. There is a lot of stuff that you would want to turn on in the addons section. I guess they have a lot of it off to cut down on overhead and not scare the crap out of new users. There are a ton of unoffical plugins that drastically cut down rigging time. Rigify is now included, but disabled when you install it. (body rigging and automatic weight mapping) There are a few facial setups that will rig a characters head in a few min as well.

You should check to see if there are plugins for all of the render engines that you have as well. Blender can use tons of them. You will have to learn the Blender way of setting up the materials for each one thou. That is not too hard to figure out.

There really isnt a need for GOZ in Blender since it can do most of what Zbrush does already (in 2.66 up).. There is a unoffical plugin called GOB to do it if you wanted to thou. There are a few threads that mention that the Blender people were waiting on the GOZ SDK, no idea if they got it or not yet.

I have most of my systems backed up so I do not need to do the dreaded massive reinstalls. I use an older version of norton windoctor to track what gets added to the registry, etc, when you install a program and add that to the backups as well. That way I can copy the program folder and add the info it needs to run if a hard drive goes south on me.

My old workstation motherboard is getting old, and I am sure it wont be long before it goes south. Something is wrong with the had drive controller and it drops drives after it has been on for a while. I tried a different poser supply but that didn't help at all. It does recognize them if you pull them then put them back in for a while thou. (All the hard drives in it are hot swappable.)

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