Well, I knew it had to had to happen eventually. I was working merrily on a new scene, and suddenly my whole box hard locked. (you know, the special kind of hard lock that when you move your mouse or hit a key, the pc speaker beeps constantly) I got the Blue Screen of memory dumpage after a few seconds, and it said that my video driver got caught in an infinite loop. Oh well . . . as another Renderosity user has so succinctly put it, "shit happens". What I can't figure out though is if it was a problem with Vue, or my video driver (I have the latest NVidia Detonators) So the point to this post is the age-old adage - "Save your work often!!!" I had just gotten the texture map perfect on a really complex river bed terrain when the program crapped out. And of course, I hadn't saved . . . :-(

Terrible every time I hear that, but all of us Vue-ers know exactly what you mean. Do you think it was Vue's fault or Windows? Yep, save often is excellent advice for ALL software, but especially Vue. I hit thet "save" menu item every few minutes, or before I do something I think Vue might not like. Anyhow, like I've told others, my personal experience is that the 4.05-02 version ids the most stable so far, and I haven't had a crash at all yet, since upgrading. it's worth trying, because you can revert to 4.03 if you don't like it, via the "Back" folder which is created when you add a new patch. Well, I did just have some major Vue crashes-- first ones since updating-- but that was after I updated my 3DFX Voodoo 3 driver to the latest thing. Reverting to the original driver solved that problem, but Vue was the only program I have that couldn't deal with the new driver. It crashed instantly every single time I tried to select "wireframe" mode in any viewport. shrug

I'd like to thank everyone who has written a little horror story about the apparent problems Vue has with the newer video cards and their drivers. I was going to update my ATI RagePRO X.x, however, I've not had a single problem with Vue, knock on wood, so I think I'll stick with the old card until I finally upgrade my entire system.

So, freezing is always an hard thing . Concerning windows, it can be due to software running in the background. Concerning Vue, I have Vue 2 and I save often (as soon as I make an improtant change in a scene, or before that :)) ). But also I know that Vue2.1 can have problems with liquid rendering (rays traveling through materials). Finally an other important point I have noticed is I always had problems when trying to improve the drivers of my Video cards (this is due to the fact that, basically, the manufacturer of the chipset is often not the same as for the video card). Sometimes it is necessary to install the older drivers for your card. Yves

Mike, I don't think it was a Windows problem, because my Windows is very stable and rarely has any problems. It was probably just one of those random computer blow-ups that just seem to happen every once and a while. If it happens again, I might have to take your advice and go to 4.05. Until then, I'll just be sure to save often. Christoph out . . .

I had loads of problems with the 4.05 patch, and even though they seem to be ironed out now, I still get a damn annoying zooming in/out problem where it freezes solid, including the mouse pointer, leaving me no alternative except reboot. Happens with big, small or medium scenes. I can't recall having the problem while using the 4.03 patch. JoeBlack

Might not have been software at all. The beeps could mean a hardware problem. If you can find your motherboard manual it should tell you what the beeps mean.

Try using Vue on Win XP Pro seems pretty stable to me so far I`m using 4.03

Yeah, I'm using it on XP Pro.