I had all kinds of troubles with Poser 4.03 and the general preferences, on both win2k AND Win98se. For most people the general preference problem lies in the short cut in the curious labs folder needing to be pointed back to the metacreations folder. However i started running into that problem on 4.02, so I was never able to apply that fix. The dinging in the rendering problem is likely a shared resource acting up, something that wasn;t so noticeable on Win98. Examples of this, could be a Via chipset motherboard, and a Creative Labs sound card, which generally have a clash/share the irq for the USB, and can create some grief. Have you downloaded the service packs for Win2k? They may possibly fix your ills. For comparison's sake I am running a dual boot, Win98SE, and Win2k, on a P3 700, with 512MB's of ram, and a nVidia geforce2 MX400 with 64 MB's of ram.