Has anyone noticed a decided touchiness with Bryce if Word is running? When I have Word open concurrently, Bryce acts funny every single time. Tonight it would not keep the object attributes window-palette-thingies open. It also arbitrarily decided to not antialias some things. When I closed Word, it went back to normal. I have never noticed this with any other app, just Word. Anyone else experience this? I am running XP, by the way.

Come to think of it, I have never run word and bryce at the same time. Bryce uses the processor more than ram and come to think of it, so does word. Buy a bigger chip.

I have noticed that Bryce will render happily in the background with some applications open, but others will freeze it (presumably depending on how they multi-task).

I have had word running just recently while rendering and have had no problems with it,

I run XP with Word and Bryce open all the time and haven't had a problem. The only thing I have noticed is if I've got lots of apps running at once, the Bryce background screen very occasionally disappears when a menu is brought up in DTE, but that's only if I'm using over 700-ish Mb for other apps. It COULD be a memory problem, but I doubt it (as long as you're running >=128Mb). It might be a corrupted version of Word or Bryce (just re-install them to check) or it might even be a graphics card problem (but that's generally if the graphics start looking a bit frayed - stuff is left begin when you drag things, etc.) I advise re-installing both if it's causing hassle, because XP should be fine multi-tasking with many apps running at one time.

I've had this problem running Photoshop and Bryce at the same time. I've also had that prob at home because my home machine is slower than my box at work, even with tons of ram. A faster processor would definitely cure what ails ya.

Thanks to all who replied. Faster processor is out right at this moment, so I guess I'll try reinstalling both Bryce and Word. I always suspect Word. I think Word is guilty of everything (sinking the Titanic, shooting JR, tanking Enron .... everything).

I find that Bryce works best when run alone. I think it utilizes 100% of available memory and doesn't like to share. :^) I usually watch TV while rendering. About the only program I run at the same time is Poser, and it tends to flake out sometimes.

I noticed someone said they had no problems running Word and Bryce at the same time. Perhaps they had a more recent version than you did, Peej?

big_hoovie, yeah, good thought. My Word isn't latest/greatest. Bryce is.

Yeah, it depends a lot on versions and certainly OS. I'm on Word2002. Earlier versions (of anything, really) tend to be less memory efficient. When I run a render on the Win98 machine, the rest of the stuff slows down quite a bit and individual progs tend to hog all the CPU. On XP, I can run a render, a download in the background, plus loads of other heavy apps with no slowdown and everyone sharing memory happy happy! The only exception I've found is Poser. It instantly grabs ludicrous amounts of memory and hogs it in a nasty fashion. A simple scene with Michael2 & Vicky2 grabbed a whole gig and whilst it rendered nothing else would function. Also - has anyone else noticed that Poser uses between 10 and 20% CPU even when idle? Why? Maybe I should post this in the Poser section. And maybe I should shut the hell up. Sometimes I am so f***ing boring...