I'm running P5 on ME with a 1.7 ghz athlon and 768mg DDR ram, 32 mg video card. I have an occasional glitch, but mostly works fine. I found that upgrading from 512 to 768 made a big difference. I have EZ CD creator, it doesn't seem to cause problems. I haven't downloaded the patch yet. It definitely suck that people with seemingly normal and up to date machines are having so much trouble.I would be frustrated to no end if I was in the situation that a lot of others are in. Dave-So, in your first comment you said that in firefly it shows that it's rendering, but only the background shows up. In firefly the background pops up first and then the render starts from the top down, unlike the P4 renderer. Maybe it's just taking a long time to get down to the figure part. I've had to wait a while looking at a black background before seeing the figure start to render. I don't know, you've probably thought of all this and a lot more. P5 is fairly cheap for an upgrade. I'm disappointed with Judy, she's not usable for me. Too ugly even with trying all kinds of morphs. The hair looks weird (wirey and too shiney) and you can't export it. The material room is a needed addition and works well. The clothifier is in my opinion the best new feature in P5. I guess I'm saying that all in all, for me, it's worth the $179 but not much more than that. I hope someone figures out what the problem is for those of you who can't use it.