Well. just to add my two penneth, ive got  v6infinate, and i have noticed the odd random crash, which i have to say i just put down to it being buggy...i remember the same thing happening with vue 5 when it wa released, and the fixed by the service release.
Ive had no probs with any of my plants/objects, it tseems to be happy with all of them, i find it a little odd that it puts its fileing system in to my documents...but hey its easier to navigate too that way, and im assuming that there must be a way to put it on another drive as you can with poser librarys, this will save a huge amout of space .
I have to run these programes off a note book because i work on ships a great deal so my equipment has to be portable, and i have had no probs with vue 5 infinate or poser 6 running on my machine, however i  have noticed that vue 6 inf seems to be incredibly slow!! NO i know that it will be slower running on a note book than on something more chunky, however even given this it seems to be very slow!
I love the idea of being able to use the poser textureing system and pose figures with in the applications as this will make things a great deal less time consuming for me , and it also seems that you can imort a poser scene, and move the bits and peices around with in it individualy with out too much trouble which is again a vast improvement!
I hope that these rediculus copyright issues with plants are resolved and my one biggest wish in the future is that the programme has more basic plants shipping with it, certainly those which some of us payed good moneyt for in vue four, such as the orange tree, the walnut, and yucca, which we find we now have to purchace.....for those of us who upgrade regularly this eems to be a little harsh, and also a rather cheap way of making revenue from loyal customers.
All in all i have always come back to vue rather than any of the other software out there as i think it is an amazing tool which by far produces the best results around!!
So fingers xxxed that thesre bugs are squished in a timley manner and that the proper version is avalible for us all soon!!

Having jus read this discussion line, and actually being a designer and having a degree in horticulture, im very interested the creation of new plant species, and the lan editor in vue is very usefull to some extent, but as oyu say you need a base to start off with.
i would really like to see e-on ship vue with a basic pine tree ( there are some good ones on corucopia which are infantly adaptable in the editor but i dont see how they could not include one of the planets most prolific vegitation typed)
a fruit bearing tree
and a plant which has both foliage and flowers on stems.
this would then give the user a great deal more flexibility.
I also think  that its discracefull that the walnut, sonnitera and other basic species were not adapted for the newer versions of view, and if they were we then had to go buy them all over again which cost a fortune. this was a little oppertunistic of e-on and c3d and i think it is something they should really rectify to keep their fan base loyal.
They coulod bring out a packakage of basic plant types whic cover say, broad leafed, conical and palm trees, lillys, orchids,broad leafed flowering herbacious, shrubs and grasses and a fruit bearing tree and herbacious plant.
This should keep every one happy!!
Some how i doubt that it will happen though as C3d is making a lot of wonga from its plant sales......

I have some times found that view 5 is better for really complex poser scenes as far as rendering goes, and if oyu have the lighting addon light tune you can have so much more controll over the render than in poser as far as lighting and shadow are concerned. View 5 does seem to taks a while to import the figers but it seems fine with larger textures too. dont know if this helps. ivew just renderd a scene with mic 3 and v3 along witl a crow a bunch of props and clothes and hair and it did it fine, reducing the bucket size in the render settings helps - i tend to render at 2000 wide by what ever deep at 300dpi and dont often run in t problems with p6. ( touch wood....lots and lots of it!!!!)

I garnered a little trick to help renders in p6 - when you are in render settings reduce the bucket size from the default to about 22 that speeds the render up, seems to stop it stalling and also allows you to cancel the render if you decide to with out the whole darned lot crashing to a halt! Also unless you can see the back of an object throught the front ( ii if it is transparent or open at the front like a coat or dress) check the ignore back faceing polygons button. hope this helps