Hello Everyone, I'm new to Poser and fell in love. Problem, my poser 4 crashes everytime i start messing with the dials on the right (axis, tapering, etc...). When I say crash I mean complete reset of computer, win 2000 platform, 1.7 G AMD Athlon, 512 memory, Radeon 8500LE 128 mb. I have ventrued to the downloads section and proceeded to acquire new textures, clothing, morphs etc. Thought I had installed correctly per instructions, yet now with crashing left and right I am beginning to wonder. Any suggestions? Is there perhaps an utility out there that will check for corrupted files or install paths (Not sure new to this field), or should i completely uninstall and reinstall poser? ~shudders hoping not, for she is no longer in the possession of downloads as she deleted after installing and seen that they were working. I appreciate the assistance and hoping not to become to discourage as poser seems to be then creative outlet I needed at this time.

I'm running Windows98 on an Athlon T-Bird 800, with 128 PC100 RAM. I do experience some freezing when rendering or importing objects, and the occasional crash, I have never had a problem whilst using the parameter dials.

In your situation an uninstall/reinstall would be my first thought. If you uninstall via Control Panel, it should lave your library intact (all your figures, props textures, etc). It's a fairly easy procedure really.

If the reinstall did not help I would start looking at the configuration of my system, I use a permanent swap file of 512 MB virtual RAM. Apart from that, see if you can disable anything running in the background that may be conflicting or eating up resources, anti-virus is usually the only thing you absolutely need. Look at your graphics card setup, and run the Windows DirectX diagnostic tool DXDIAG.EXE.

It's Curious Labs software, so get on to them and hound them till it does work.

heyas; make sure you're using 4.03. if you bought it recently from curious labs, you should have that latest version. if you got it somewhere else, download and install the patch.

Thank you all for the responses. Patched last night. Also moved my color to 16 bit as suggested and acceleration was moved down a peg. Still crashes. I'm wondering if something (file) might be in the wrong spot. If so would it cause a crash? Don't laugh, but I wish there was a program like file cop (sims has one) so it will check files for errors or whatnot. ~smiles I am close to resigned to totally removing and reinstalling, then carefully reading every tutorial i can find before installing any "extras". Was so excited, when I found the different textures, obj. and misc. files for poser, to help change the appearances, that I may have gotten carried away. Once again I appreciate the input, and now will locate some tutorials to tell me exactly where everything should be. Then hit my hard drive and make sure there is nothing out of place. Thank you again. Safe journey and blessed be.

A complete reset would suggest to me that there is something deeper here then just a Poser problem. You might want to look to see if there are any hardware or I/O conflicts. Also, a check to see that your video card has the last drivers would be in order.

Checked drivers first thing, current download was already updated. Even went to window updates made sure all security patches were done and necessary downloads were installed.. As for hardware and I/O conflicts, better half checked that and said it should be fine on that end. Cable Modem is the only thing different between our two computers (it's on mine) and yet he has no problem with his install. So Im pretty much at lost, except if I may have put a file in wrong location or maybe the install was corrupted. Been installed for aprox 2 weeks. At first seemed fine, yet i didn't mess with the dials, but once started changing them, the whole system would reset. First thought video card, yet we game online hard, no problems there, i use PSP, PS, and other programs no resets or problems. Music Videos, movies, the same nothing. Just happens whenever I open Poser and start to play in side.

Hmmmm ... it sounds like the poser.rsr file might have been corrupted. I think at this point I'd copy the .rsr from the PC that's working correctly to the one that isn't. The poser.rsr goes in the Poser folder with the poser.exe. After you've copied it there set the attributes to read-only. If that works, you're home free. You'll have to remember to set the attributes to read/write if you make any changes to the layout of your work area though. I've heard of odd things happening if the poser.rsr gets corrupted but never quite as drastic as taking down the whole system though.

Well I tried that. It still crashed, as soon as I opened and went to change the poser dork as he is called. ~pats it's head not to be unkind. This worries me. Two questions. I noticed I had two Textures file. One located under runtime One located in liabries. I should only have the one in runtime correct? If its wrong could this be the problem? Next when I updated the poser the other eve, there should be an additional poser 4 updated file within the poser file correct? Housing whatever was downloaded? Or do i need to move these files within the original poser to update it? Crazy questions I know. But I am getting desperate and one step from deleting. Which may be the best. Thank you again for your input it means very much to me. Myl

The location of the texture file shouldn't make a difference. If Poser can't find the texture file it wants it'll complain about it but shouldn't tank like that. As to the update, when you run the update the Poser.exe and some other files get replaced. You'd just have to run the update .exe file and it'll ask where the version of Poser to be updated is located. At this point, it may be the best course to UNINSTALL Poser the re-install it. If you uninstall, just the Poser program stuff gets deleted and the folders containing any of your imported materials will remain intact. Re-installing will put Poser's stuff back out there and you can see if there's still a problem. Boy, something is really screwed up on this one. :(

indeed it is! ~mutters We uninstalled and reinstalled 3 times. This weekend my husband is going to do some test with my video card (only 3 weeks old the sucker will go back!) and trade out our cards to see if that might be the problem. No matter what I do, it causes errors then dumps the computer to reboot. If im lucky! Last one gave me a blue screen and I am about lost as to what in the world is going on. New 80 gb hd, so shouldnt be anything amiss there. Oh well will see what the weekend brings, and continue to read tutorials and examples. Thank you for your help tremendously. Safe journey and blessed be Myl

At this point, I suggest getting in touch with CL support. The forums here can answer just about anything that comes down the pike but this appears to be an unusual case. If you find a resolution through CL please let me know about it. You can contact me directly at: bushi@velocitus.net

sure well, thank you again for your help!

Hey Myliana, I know this is a bit late, but just read the thread, and if you're still having problems I was wondering if you and your significant other's PC's are networked together, and operating the same copy (same Registration code) of Poser4.03 on both PC's. The reason I ask this is because if you installed on his first, and then on yours, and are networked, Poser4.03 has an internal check and kill-switch property that will crash any other PC's operating the same program on a network. If this does not apply to you, please disregard question, and I hope you find a solution (or did find one). Good luck, and Take care.

Thanks for responding, no two seperate copies, he bought his and i acquired mine from a family member who didn't have the patience to learn ! Wish they had changed their mind before buying. We may have found the problem. My computer was set up under a NSFT (? may be wrong) system instead of a FAT32, I have a 60 gb harddrive. So we partioned my harddrive into two, changed to the FAT32 and haven't crashed so far, except ones, and I believe it was because I went to far out of the axis (? really made an item large on poser the face to be exact) and it crashed to desktop. But since then I have not had a problem. Albeit I haven't had time to really work in it as I am still reinstalling. Will update as I go and let you all know. I hope this may help someone else in the future, in case they get this weird response. Thank you all for your help. Safe journey and blessed be, Myl

The only way I could see NTFS (NT File System) affecting Poser in this way would be if there was some sort of permission-related issue or possibly a bad sector or other hard drive flaw. FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32) does not have the permission overhead and would allow any user to use any file on the FAT32 partition. Both NTFS and FAT32 are methods of making the hard drive surface readable to the Operating System and software.

If it was a flaw you would think the other programs I ran would be affected also, which they were not. Dreamweaver,flash, photoshop, paintshop, intense gaming, earth and beyond, daoc, eq, not to mention bryce and the game developement software we use. Well either way I reformated it back to the NTFS and it still wouldn't run. So re-reformated (is that a word?) and used the fat32 and poser hasn't crashed once on me since then. I care not what fixed it, just know I can access Poser again and that is good enough for me. Thanks for all the input and help from everyone. A great group of people. Safe journey and blessed be Myl