I've found that '98 sucks for Poser work. Win2000 is the way to go, Poser just runs so much faster. I have had the same exact problem, and then I took the same exact file to my Win2k machine (which is 200mhz SLOWER, btw), and not only did the render start sooner, it rendered faster. The problem is '98 machines with over 64MB of RAM will access the swap file before it needs to - which is nuts, if you have 128, or 256, your swap file shouldn't need to be accessed on simple jobs, and it will always run slower than real RAM. There is a fix, but it only marginally improved performance for me. I will find it and post it to the tech forum this evening.