Want to know the kicker? Everything still worked, I was able to poke around and change some base colors, then I went back to the pose room, same thing but I made him smile and got ride of that damned nictoral membrane too. Stats: XP P4 1.4ghrz 512 rdram Nvida Geforce 2 GTS card Dell make, upgraded from ME by me.lol

Personally, I would tend to think that the amount of memory is also the problem. or also your veirtual memory settings. The processor is beefy enough for poser to be sure but the 512 ram is not helpful. I have a system with 512 and it gets boggy with 512. But the other systen with a GB runs far better. But you do have a point and the mil dragon as obj heavy as it is will be a prob on it;s own.

I just don't understand this. I'm on a 1.4g amd with 512 ddr ram and Win2K and I have NO problems. Some minor slowdowns (to be expected with a modern app). I wonder what all the problems are.

Now I restarted Poser with the same file. Turned render on ful l with everything checked including depth cue, put on dacia depth cue complete light set(about 35 lights) and hit render...no problems....after render I tried the parameter dials and materials room again. This has not happened with any other figure at all, I"ve had no problems with anything, not even vick or mike 2. Those of you that had problems could you list what models you were using?

Good card, no boggyness at all, latest drivers...Like I said this has only happened with a model of 60,000 polys, the mil dragon.

Have to mention, I had no problems with the mil dragon in p4/propack. I could post move color, mat et all with out any bog down or problems.

Have you tried using the XP compatibility adjustments? I suspect there's something wrong with the way P 5 handles the WM_PAINT message in the Windows loop. If you check the Win 98 Compatibility box, Win somehow slows down the message flow, which can help this type of problem.

hrm...I'll try that ockham!

If you've only upgraded to ME, consider a further upgrade to XP. Regardless of the compatibility mode XP's NT based memory management is far surperior to the 95/98/ME memory management. Bill

Or consider upgrade to win2k pro. I have a dual boot ME/w2k pro machine at home and winXP pro at work. For many reasons, I prefer w2k overall.

I apologise for that last post, I had misread your system spec description. Another thing that a few people have tried, with some success is uninstalling and reinstalling Poser 5. Bill

I'm using an Amd AthalonXp running at 1.15mhz,G-Force4 ti,WindowsXP and 512megs of memory.I had no trouble with the Mil Dragon in Poser5.It could be your video card.Problems have been reported with many other programs using the older cards.

Since no version of poser gives two hoots about any video card. Nor does it use open gl or direct draw and is an application that runs from memory and processor and hdd. The main culprit is conventional memory size and virtual memory settings. I would look at what your virtual memory settings are set to and ajust them. Win2K and XP Pro are the best for making these ajustments, next is ME, last is 98 with no real adjustments possable. Microsoft suggests for virtual setting as the minimum set to 1 and 1/2 memory installed and the max set to 2 and 1/2 what memory is installed. I run poser5 on a 1 G processor with 1GB of memory with W2K and the problems I have a not as bad or as envolved.

I just tried it for the heck of it. I have not had these problems like others. Loaded the dragon and texture. No problems. Went to all rooms multiple times. Dual AMD 1.2, 512 and GeForce3 Ti 500. Win2K Pro SP3. Ron

And I'll keep saying it until people listen. :-) Crashes Weird screen behavior overlapping video screens wacky materials room pallet displays etc....... These are ALL due to trying to push P5 farther than your machine can handle it. High polygon figures and scenes full of props will surely get you to that point in a big, BIG hurry. Previous versions of Poser could handle these larger file sizes easier. That's why everyone is thinking the software is broken. The reality is Poser5 needs three times the machine you used to be able to use with previous versions. Yes it sucks. But it's not a bug! ScottA

I sincerely hope you're wrong Scott and it is a bug! As I'll keep saying until people listen... ;-) Poser 5 is a 32 bit application. That means it has a maximum address space of 4GB. Two GB are reserved for the application, Windows services file buffers etc. The other 2GB are available for general memory allocation, ie. resources, meshes, textures etc. Now if people are (in trivial examples) having problems with memory configurations of about 1GB, at the outset, then they should bear in mind that they are probably already half way to P5's maximum resource capacity. It won't matter how much real memory or processing power, or what (32/64 bit OS) you throw at it. Five years from now, 32 bit P5 is still going to be limited to its 2/4GB memory capacity, even on a system with 100GHz+ processor, a 64 bit OS, and hundreds of gigs of real memory. And you're not going to be able to do any more on it than you can today. This is as good as its going to get, kids! So if one millenium dragon needs (for example) a gigabyte of memory to run, then 3 or 4 (uniquely textured) may be the maximum P5 can EVER support. Of course if someone can load 3 or 4 Millenium dragons in P5 without it crashing, then this problem IS a bug after all. P4 was (needlessly) dreadful in resource management. There is no reason why P5 should have been any worse (no dynamic hair or cloth in this example), and it would have been nice if it had been improved - the adoption of a Reyes type renderer should have reduced the resource requirements (at least for non-raytracing renders). But somehow, it just seemed to get worse :-( As I've said before - Built in Obselence. Bill Ps . lalverson - although Poser doesn't use hardware acceleration, its still a good idea to make sure that you have the latest video drivers, which are still needed even for non-accelerated display.

I tried the Win98 compatibility and got the error: Unsupported driver call, check driver version. P5 crashes a lot in the Material Room for me. I can have one figure, or a bunch of figures. It doesn't matter. It seems to be pretty consistant when it crashes - when I try to copy the material settings / node settings from one material to all materials in a figure. It doesn't need to be a large polygon figure, either. I'll try updating the video drivers, but I don't see how that will help in this case. P4, 1.7Ghz, 512Mb RAM, XP Pro.

Updating the video driver now kills renders dead. I can do a basic render, but I'm trying to play with the toon shader and both firefly and P4 die when I try to render anything using toon mode. Even Vicki 1 Lo Res won't render. Time to roll back the driver so I can get one or two test renders at a time before P5 crashes. GRR!!!

Yes compatibility didn't work for me either...I would like remind everyone that this did not happen before I used a high polygon model. Everything relies on video to some extent(look at your screen folks) I'll a new driver, but I think I have the latest, since i had gotten when I upgraded to xp. Scott this is not close to pushing my system. Now the materials room & paramdials are jacked visually but still work with a bit of poking. Selection brings things to the for front, and right click still works in the material room. All other rooms fine. I've been tweaking that dragon some more despite the problems, material editing is fun :)

Well, the material room is mostly working now for me, low or hi poly figures. I ended up: Roll back the video driver. Up the minimum page file to 1GB from 768MB. (Reboot.) Defrag several of my drives, including the system and Poser partitions. Uninstall P4. Uninstall P5. (Reboot.) Upgrade the video driver again. (Reboot.) Install P5 clean. (The first time, it was a P4 upgrade.) (Reboot.) Watch P5 misbehave. Cold boot a few times. Swear loudly. (Intermittantly through the whole process.) Selecting and applying all material nodes is still a bit hit or miss, but I was able to change the material for the entire figure at least 10 times without crashes. (And that was using the DAZ dragon. Some of the unusual materials look seriously cool on the dragon, btw.) Even toon eventually worked - 2 additional reboots later. (Now I just have to get the effect I'm looking for.) I'm still having some poltergeist issues, but it's much more functional now. Thanks for the video driver idea. I think that and the fresh install (not the first time I've reinstalled it, either) fixed some issues. On the plus side, I didn't have to re-register on the re-install. Cheers!