I'm about 3 days from getting my cash back on this baby. I bought P5 mainly for the hair room, thought I'd finally be able to have some different styles without going broke, but this is ridiculous already...and I'm not 110% positive this will get fixed...my trust threshold is decreasing by the day. Maybe I should try to get frustrated in the cloth room or something.

Try what I'm doing ... work on learning the intricacies of the material shaders and rendering engines before moving on to the advanced, hardware-intensive stuff like dynamic cloth and hair. By the time you've mastered the first two, the latter two may have been patched.

Well, I have an XP system, Pentium, 256MB of RAM, and have no trouble like this in the hair room. (Other than not knowing exactly what I am doing, that is ;) Here is what I did before I installed Poser 5. 1) Defrag 2) Install the Windows Service Pack Update 1 (40 MB download) 3) Increase the size of my initial swap minimum to 700MB

Just out of morbid curiousity, Kiera, how long did it take to defrag your hard drive?

Little Dragon...I'm somewhat afraid if I wait too long, I won't be able to get my cash back...and I'm not sure I'm in the mood to wait very long for a patch...my inclination right now is to return P5..get my money back..hopefully...then if all is working at a later date, buy it again...this is the first program I've purchased in a real long time right when it first came out...because of exactly what has happened with P5.

This may not be relevant, but when I first got Poser4, I had lots of bizarre problems that were eventually solved by allotting more RAM to Poser. If all else fails, give it more RAM and try again!

Kiera....well, I did exactly that prior to installing P5...in fact, I uninstalled it, then ran scandisk, defrag again prior to putting it in the second time. What is interesting..I redid it because of these problems...right after the reinstall, things seemed pretty good, other than a couple of random windows remaing behind, and a couple of white document screens....it is just plain terrible today...back as it was prior to reinstalling. I already had SP1 installed... swap file---I have not touched that, however, it doesn't seem to be using the hard drive for render...other than when I crank up the hair population...these particular mages were set at default--1000 hairs....there are only 2 groups on the long hair image....so it shouldn't be taxing everything so much. Tried to send a bug report and images to Curious, but the messages keep bouncing...their email must be overflowing.

well...my virtual memory was set to 768-15xx...should be fine

What are you doing right before it happens? Is it consistent? What else are you running? How often do you reboot? Have you tried running Poser 5 in Windows 2000 compatability mode? (I have to do this for some software, for whatever reason.)

Kiera...thanks for the questions :) not consistent at all...but happens enough to be real frustrating. It seems like a memory problem to me as it gets worse as more hair is added...its as if the screen cannot refresh prior to a room change...it also happens for instance if I'm in the style box, then try to close it, the screen does not close...well it closes, but remains on the screen...it is no longer active. Then, if you attempt to edit another group, another window opens, but the original is still there...of course this causes all kinds of malcontent :)....then its save and restart poser. As far as running other stuff--nothing at all....if I do CTRL-ALT-DELETE...there are actually quite a few things in there, but they are not using any CPU cycles---system resources are 0% for these items, 100% for Poser. Reboot---often...not every time it hangs like this, but often enough...it does not seem to help Windows 2000 compatibility mode---no, that's the first time I've heard of this. I'm running XP...is it in there ???

I have seen what you describe, but not in the hair room. I "fixed it" by minimizing Poser, maximizing it, then switching to a different room, then switching back. I then was a little less frantic about clicking buttons. The interface is slow to respond when switching rooms or clicking "OK" or whatever sometimes, and if you click something else while it is still thinking about it you can muck up your interface. To run something in Windows 2000 compatibility mode, right click on the shortcut and go to the advanced tab. I find that disabling visual themes can help with interface problems also. I have to disable visual themes for Bryce 5, for example.

Thanks...I found the compatibility and set it to win2000... I'll try that theme deal as well... Yes...clicking more than once is the kiss of death on this program...I posted something about this couple of days ago...but it was probably buried at the end of one my rant sessions :) I shouldn't allow a stupid software program get the best of me...my expectations were way to high for this release...

My dad taught me to have no expectations. =) Seriously, though.. I am not going to say I haven't been frustrated. This morning I was cursing because I couldn't get a cloth plane to drape over Vicki's head. ;) So I put that down for awhile and went back to the materials editor. Overall, though, I have been pretty happy with this release.. but I haven't been suffering from crashes or freezes. The one freeze I had was because I fat-fingered a couple extra zeroes in the hair room and Poser proceeded to generate 30,000 hairs. It wasn't pretty. ;) I won't be really happy until I plop another 256MB of RAM in this machine. Then I think I will see some better performance overall.

By the way...I figure about 2gigs of memory would work real well with P5 :) Do they have 6ghz CPUs yet ????

Well you are doing a hell of a lot better than I am in the hair room. ;) If you lengthen the rest of the front a bit you will have a skater look going.. or shorten the rest and it will be Julius Caesar. ;) I hope that compatibility mode helps, but if not I will keep thinking about the problem. Feel free to IM me. I used to do tech support for a living. ;) I only play an artist on tv.. Sleep well. =)

Hi dave. Yeah the hair room is not totally easy to do...but you will get the hang of it. The thing is there are a lot of styles that are achieved by trans mapped hair that are near impossible to create using the strand based hair. I was going to give up making trans mapped hair and concentrate on worlds and clothes and stuff, but I think I will still make some newer trans mapped styles. Cheers Harvey

I had a similar problem of getting both rooms at once but waiting a minute then switching to another room and then back solved it. It does require serrious resources and if you don't have them, patience is necessary. I do have one additional question for all of you. Have you saved a pz3 file whith the new hair and then loaded it in Vue. I did but no new hair!! I also tired several other formats and no hair or you get the hair but not the body texture. It does show in the group proir to exporting it. I am not about to give up there is so much potential here if I can just learn it all or most.

Another thing to consider is your video card drivers. Make sure you have the latest. This looks very much like what happens with bad drivers or buggy ones... -Paul

vid drivers...I have the latest nvidia drives 40.xx whatever... I was actually thinking about going backwards couple of revisions...although I will say that this is a problem Curious is aware of and looking for a fix, so it may be just as well to not worry too much more about it and either do as I said earlier or hold on and wait.