Ya I had the same type of render hangs and found setting the lights and shadows to one. Also loading poser with no character helped load faster. but the biggest thing that was maddening Poser did'nt release memory and I had to reboot to get all memory back. Then I read about setting vcache. using cacheman. Now all the memory is released when I return back to the desktop.that was with Win98. I up graded to XP !!I dont' see any difference in speed!!. rendering or system and I have plenty of ram Pent4 1.6g 640 meg ram