Last thing I need to hear is "told you so" I installed a magazine demo of propack and removed it a month back. Since then my Poser 4 has been temperamental. Now I am having the following error popup when opening some downloaded freebies. [The drive or network connection that the shortcut 'Shortcut to Cr2Editor.link refers to is unavailable. Make sure that the disc is properly inserted or the network resource is available, and then try again.] This appears along with can't find texture messages, now I am sweating profusely with the thought I may need to re-install Poser. Is it possible to re-install over the top without losing my huge existing libraries or is the news going to be all bad? Please relieve my misery with some good advice. Tommy.

Copy your "Runtime" directory somewhere else, or burn it to a CD. Uninstall, restart, and reinstall Poser. Patch as needed. Then copy your saved Runtime directory back in, and all should be well. Tilandra

Thanks Tilandra, still a little in doubt here, just checked properties of my runtime folder and it comes up as 2.16 GIG. I have a burner but not sure how to get over 2Gig on a 700 meg disc, looks like I'd need a method to burn onto 3 Cd's. Is that possible or should I break up the contents into say 4 folders? Tommy.

Well, what I do is move it to another hard drive on another machine via my home network, but even moving it to c:/Runtime would protect it from a reinstall, so long as you watch your directory path on the reinstall. But, you can split it up to separate CDs, it will be a little time-consuming though. It's always good to have a hard back-up anyway. :) Just create a Runtime folder on each CD, and select different sub-folders to put inside each one, spacing the amount of data as evenly as possible between them. You geometries folder is probably the big one. See if you can fit that on one disk, just remember to keep your paths intact so copying them back is simple! Tilandra

What did you use to delete the demo? I'm assuming you're on a PC, in which case you could have detrius all over the place left over from the uninstall. There are a couple of really good programs out there that search for "orphans" and delete them. You might want to check into that just to make sure. Also -- and perhaps the Poser Technical page might be the better place to ask this -- is it possible the demo re-wrote some of the coding in some of your Poser files, even with the save-disabled function? Frankly, I don't know much about PCs and how the PP works, but it strikes me as a possibility.

I have removed and re-installed the program plus restored the runtime folder after saving it on my desktop. But... that "damn !" error message still comes up if a texture cant be located, worse if I'm low on RAM it freezes Poser solid, only escape is cont/alt/del. Yes I did use the windows remove programs to remove the propack demo a month back but the bug only showed up yesterday, have virus checked and defragged to no avail. Virtuals orphan files theory does sound plausible. Tommy.

i've had to reinstall poser heaps of time, you can just reinstall over the top and not lose anything

I'm low on RAM it freezes Poser solid Chances are here you're getting the one-size-fits-all error message that comes when Poser is having problems locating something, usually a geometry file. Generally, if it's missing a texture, it'll simply ask for you to directions, but then again, who knows what's going on under the hood there.

The error message is telling you that a Windows shortcut to a program - Cr2Editor.link - can't be located. If this happens on opening files, the program Cr2Editor is probably associated with a Poser filetype (most likely cr2 files). Apparently you had CR2Editor installed and moved or deleted it. Open a folder and goto the menu item tools->options->filetypes and look for filetypes associated with the CR2Editor and delete them or reinstall the program. This is a Windows generated error message, not Poser.

Bingo! lmckenzie, I searched in windows 'Find' for cr2editor and found a 1kb file and a 1kb shortcut created january 2002 which I deleted. Can only guess it was a leftover from the Propack demo, as you guessed the error message no longer appears. Thanks to everyone for all their help here today. Tommy.

cr2editor is a separate program. There is one version available in Free Stuff and a more comprehensive version for sale. It is not part of Poser or the Poser Pro pack. I hate to think of you going through all that hardship and trouble when it wasn't necessary. One thing that concerns me here. You apparently deleted CR2 Editor, rather than uninstalling the program. That's why the shortcut remained, when the program was no longer there. You never delete programs, you always uninstall them. It is possible that somehow Poser Pro did the dirty deed, rather than you. I just have to throw out the "do not delete programs" warning as much as possible. You might be surprised to see how many people make that mistake. I suggest getting Norton SystemWorks. It has many great utilities. One of them, Windoctor, would have easily taken care of that problem. Ron