I can't get through to CP, either.

Yes, that's normal. I downloaded the ones that sounded interesting and left the ones I couldn't imagine myself using.

I think A3 was pretty well established before TY2 came along. There's a lot of material for A3 and the base figure is free. TY2 is a good model and I don't think that there are any problems. It's a good idea to get the RDNA head morphs for TY2, because they make her quite a bit more versatile.

With any luck, the previous suggestions will have fixed the problem. In the event that they don't, how big is the file that was created by the save (you mention that they are small scenes, but how big are they in system terms)? I have seen the problem you describe in your initial paragraph and something similar to the one in your second item 2) :0. I have only seen the first one in Poser 6 and I have mainly seen the second one in Poser 5, but I never knew it to corrupt a saved Poser file (I thought that was a Vue trick). Something like this was discussed in a thread http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=2410026 and the URLs posted there did seem useful. Both these problems (in my case) do seem to me to have been linked to the actual size of the file on disk. This PC has 2GB of memory, which is as much as Poser knows what to do with, but it still hits the buffers when I try to render a large scene. Dizzi points out in the thread above that, if Poser gives up on a save, it's the lights that are first thing to get chucked overboard. I can't understand how the action of saving or rendering a subsequent save can corrupt a previous save, but I am NOT doubting that your previously saved files are corrupted. I suspect that they are saved intact, but that Poser can't re-load them. I tried deleting all of the unused morphs from figures in my scene. It did help, but I had to go back to an earlier save and re-do one whole figure from scratch. I hope that some of this helps!

I think I probably got that, too. I think I probably had to give up on the first corrupted file, because it was too much of a nightmare. I went back to the version I had saved before adding the last figure and tried again and didn't shut it down until I had rendered everything. There were things that needed to be corrected, though, and, of course, when I tried to open the file up again, the same thing had happened, so that was when I went back to the last good version again and started stripping out morphs. Whether the figures lost their footwear I don't know, because Poser made such a mess of the scene that it would have been hard to tell.

I had the same thing. I have tried the RDNA solution and it seems to work. My own solution was to remove unused morphs from figures in the scene. That worked, too, but it did also induce catalepsy, and the trouble was that the corruption didn't seemed to be linked purely to the size of a file. The second time I saw this, the file was much smaller than the reduced file that had worked OK the first time. I've only ever had the problem with scenes containing multiple figures, i.e. more than one person figure, plus clothing item figures etc.. I got to the stage of saving a file with a new name after every significant change, which amounted to serious space on the drive. I suspect a dastardly plot by the manufacturers of hard drives.

To be fair, this thread isn't irrelevant to Poser users. I did download the new version/release/woddevva of D/S, but I am mainly a Poser user and I also made the mistake of buying a couple of things from DAZ today. It wasn't that there was anything wrong with them; only that the time for the downloads was geologically significant. It doesn't cost me any more, on ADSL, however long the download takes, but, in this country (the UK) and, I suspect, in plenty of others, the cost on a dial-up connection of downloading anything from DAZ right now could be a multiple of the original price of the product (and, thanks, I do know that a multiple of the cost of D/S will still be zero). It is perfectly appropriate to raise this sort of thing in the Poser forum. A Poser user with no involvement with D/S is going to come here for information about Poser issues. He or she will not spontaneously check the D/S forum.

When I installed Poser 6, it seemed virtually useless. Trying to render a picture (any picture) was like trying to spot an ostrich on the Moon. I reverted to Poser 5 for everything and composed a blistering complaint to CuriousLabs (I'm good at blistering) and then decided to check for a hardware upgrade. To be fair to CuriousLabs, checking for a driver upgrade is stressed as an absolute necessity about four hundred times, when you install P6. To be fair to me, I HAD checked and Windows had found nothing. When I checked again, a driver was available and it transformed the performance of P6. I have not gone back to P5 since then. Don't get rid of any earlier release, until you have P6 functioning properly, of course, but there could be a driver fix for the problem, even if you have previously searched.

I don't think I have seen this at P6, but that may be because I use the Firefly renderer (not implying that it's necessarily better, merely that it is not the same). When I first installed P6, it was reluctant to render anything at all, but a graphics driver upgrade finally appeared which fixed the problems. Since Windows didn't locate any new driver at the time I installed P6, that may be worth checking again, but my early attempts at P6 renders usually didn't get anywhere close to the actual rendering stage, so I suspect that the trouble in the case of your image may be a memory problem.
I generally resort to the Windows Task Manager in those cases. The Poser process (Poser.exe) will have nearly all the CPU (97%+) and a very big figure in the "Mem Usage" column. Even when Poser is working properly, it will take ninety-odd per cent of the CPU during rendering and a large amount of whatever memory is available. When it stalls, it keeps all of the CPU, but the "Mem usage" number freezes. If "Mem Usage" stops updating, then, in my experience, the render has hit the buffers and the only thing to do is to stop the process, because trying to cancel the rendering is already too late. (For that reason, I try always to save a scene before doing any kind of rendering.) It's worth checking the task manager a number of times, before doing anything drastic, though, because the updates to "Mem Usage" can be quite slow. If it updates, however slowly, it's still doing something. If it doesn't, it isn't.
The solution may be to render elements of the scene individually. In the example above, you might render the figure at the back, along with the ground, then the figure at the left, then the one at the right. If the files are rendered as TIFFs, they can be put together in something like Photoshop. The problems start, though, when figures cast shadows on each other, or interact in other ways, because figures that interact need to be rendered together. That can make things complicated.
I was something of a late comer to Poser, so I have used P5 and P6 much more than P4 (I can test things on P4, if necessary). Have you tried using the Firefly renderer and, if so, what happens? In P5, I often found that a render would seem to be going swimmingly, until it abruptly gave up. I never knew what caused that. The render didn't complete, but Poser continued running. The only solution was to try again, with reduced settings for the render job, which usually worked. That implies that there was some sort of resource shortage, but it wasn't one that caused Poser as a whole to lock up.
Sorry for the essay, but I hope some of this helps.