And boy, I want to like it. I've owned every version of Poser except for the Pro Pack, and none of them have given me as much trouble as Poser 5 has in just a few hours. Installation went smoothly last night, and the much-dreaded registration process completed without a hitch.

Then I ran the program.

The very first time I ran it, it advanced through the attractive banner screen (they get nicer looking with every release), and promptly proceeded to hang. I waited one or two minutes before I decided it wasn't going to come up, and killed the program from the task manager.

I did that a lot last night. I think that I've only exited P5 normally twice so far.

Before anybody starts pointing fingers at my system specifications: Athlon XP 1700+, 1 GB of RAM, 100 GB of hard disk space, Windows XP Professional.

The second time I ran P5, it came up successfully. I could do test renders with Don and Judy and Penny... I could add new hair props and render those, too. If I start from scratch, stuff seems to work. But I have tons of old assets, and almost none of the stuff I've tried so far seems to work in P5.

I chose a simple scene with a Vicky 2 figure, conforming clothes, and a couple of props. The first time I tried to load it, I got some messages from P5 that it couldn't find various files. Aha! I realised, I need to add my old P4 directory as a library, which I did, quite easily. With my P4 library set as the current one, I attempted to load the file again. P5 hung.

I restarted P5 and tried again; this time, P5 finished the load, but it became immediately obvious that something was Very Wrong, for now the figure was almost totally obscured by a fan-like cover of long thin polygons, radiating from a central point in front of the figure to various parts of its body. It's either new geometry that has been added somehow, or vertices in the existing geometry that have been moved, pulling these long triangles out of arms, feet, what-have-you... all meeting at one point. I wish I had a picture handy; I'll try to post one tonight.

Anyway, I tried to render this mess, with the predictable result that P5 hung again.

OK... maybe it's my scene file. So I restarted P5 and added a stock vanilla Vicky 2 figure to the default scene. I got the exact same fan-of-crud in front of it. Aieeeeee!

I don't deny that the P5 team has put a lot of work into this product already. There are a ton of new features and I can't wait to dig into them and learn to make them dance and sing. However, I'm not very encouraged by the initial stability of the product in even simple usage scenarios, as least as far as I've seen. I'm sure that Poser 5 will receive some patches; I just hope that the known problems are resolved quickly so I can get the full benefit of the CAD 300.00 I've spent on it.

-- M

Where is your Poser 5 located on your hard drive? Sharen

"X:Poser 5", a partition with 3 GB of free space.

Just wondering because I have had some software that if it wasn't directly on the C drive it would have many problems, maybe, just maybe Poser 5 needs to sit right on the c drive and have the use of Windows close at hand. Sharen

I have it on my "D" drive (along with P4) and haven't had any problems yet. No crashes and has found all my textures and all (linked P4's runtime). Running a p3 1.3 celeron with 1gb ram and win xp pro if that matters :) Sassy <--- Loves the hair lab! and now off to play with the clothes lab! WHOO HOOO!!!!

perhaps just perhaps your vicky file is corrupt. Enough where it wont work in poser5 but will work in poser4 i had those type of problems with diffrent versions of poser before.

If nothing else reinstall it on the C drive bare bones and test it. Then try adding the P4 directory and test that. I know that mine was choking to death last night in the hair lab. Maybe I need to re-read my manual but the hair room seemed less user-friendly than what I thought it would be.

"If nothing else reinstall it on the C drive bare bones and test it."

Ugh. Thanks, but no thanks. I install very little on C:, hedging against the inevitable day I'll have to wipe the partition and reinstall Windows to get rid of accumulated registry gunk. I write software for a living; I think it's highly unlikely that the problem has anything to do with the location of the installation directory or library trees.

I will reinstall the Vicky 2 figure to make sure it's OK, though. The more I think about it, the more I agree with Lady Cherry that the figure file may have been corrupted somehow. I also need to ensure that I was in fact using an unmodified version of the figure, and not a tweaked one I added to the library some time back. If that's the case, I may have unwittingly shot myself in the foot--though I should wonder why the figure loads in P4 without any trouble, but not P5.

I will report back with my findings, hopefully later tonight. Thanks for your suggestions, all.

-- M

How about making sure that all your drivers are current, particularly your video card drivers. Almost every time I have problems with a program, the issue has been either (1) not having the latest drivers or (2) Win 98 SE. Win XP Pro has been a dream.

My Victoria 2 figure underwent a months-long, multi-step installation process, starting with the original V1 figure, then V1 updates, then the V2 upgrade on top of that. Since V2 uses the V1 geometry, I thought I'd check the DAZ site to see whether I have the latest and greatest V1 update. And do you know what I discovered?

I don't!

To test this out, I reinstalled V1 and the latest V1 update to a separate file tree. I was not surprised to note that blMilWom.obj and .rsr have different sizes and more recent time stamps than the versions I've been using. When I copied these files to my Poser 4 runtime tree (after saving the old files elsewhere), the geometry problems with my V2-based figures in Poser 5 miraculously vanished! :-O

Lady Cherry, you were right. Thank you. And to Curious Labs, I offer my sincere apology for blaming Poser 5 for this particular problem.

Time to do some test renders now... :-)

-- M