I'm no techie, but I can tell you that, out at the college where I teach ContEd courses, I live in fear every time they install a new version of photoshop or illustrator into the PCs -- we inevitably get crashes until a patch is released. And for whatever reason, we never seem to have the same problems on the Macs. Yes, I know it's been more than a few years since Adobe ported these two to PCs, but, from my humble perspective, they're still having problems with the PC architecture. Again, no techie here; I'm simply telling you what I see in operation. And I've asked our technicians here what the problem might be, since I figured maybe it would be the computers involved, not the software. And nope, that ain't it. So the only conclusion I can see is that whatever problems came out of that original port, some of them still haven't been addressed. Melanie, as to the multiple programs issue, if you have sufficient memory to support it, it's great to have more than one program open at a time, because it allows you to move things from one program to another without having to wait for start-ups. For example, I usually keep Poser and Photoshop open simultaneously when I'm working on a new texture because I can build the texture in PS, apply it in Poser, then make the adjustments in PS as needed, then reapply in Poser. It's a speed thing.