Attached Link: http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/more-on-sony-dangerous-decloaking.html

Actually CA did same as Symantec - classing it as a virus - much earlier this week. And CA's tool removes it *and* prevents re-infection. BTW, there is no way to remove Sony BMG/F4I's rootkit manually. Even their own uninstall routine, if you manage to get hold of it (and accept their confidentiality requirement), runs the risk of permanently trashing your Windows OS. Symantec's action is probably in light of media pressure - to save face - seems that Symantec was the primary technical consultant behind F4I's development of this rootkit in the first place. But then Symantec have a reputation of backing both sides in the virus arms race. (Historically the bulk of the early virus development was down to Symantec with their asinine $100 bounty for all viruses submitted regardless of source, i.e. whether it had ever been released to the wild. For a few thousand handouts Symantec created the virus market it needed to compete with McAfee. Ever wondered why to this day the percentage of unreleased viruses that Symantec claims to protect against is a huge percentage of the total population count?) And the primary reason this rootkit is so bad is limited programming expertise on the part of F4I - the programmer developing it asked for help from the FOSS community during it's development. Frighteningly basic questions apparently for someone attempting something as mindblowingly complex as a kernel-level hook into Windows that needed to be FORWARD-compatible with Windows future releases. I've attached to link to Mark Russinovich's - the person who discovered it - blog.

As someone who was well up the Sony corporate heirarchy, I can assure you that Sony divisions are very, very isolated from each other. To the point of almost being a problem. Most major divisions report separately into the head of Sony directly. So what Sony BMG does to, and thinks of, their customers is very different to other parts of Sony. That's why the latest IP protection code stops Sony BMG CDs playing on Sony portables, and the HDD based Sony In-car unit! So you can go on liking Sony Electronics if you wish, just stay clear of Sony BMG. But here's a better idea - stop buying music CD's from all sources - short of directly from the artists. Such a stance would stop this customer abuse by the music studios of both us the consumer, and the musicians!!! And it's a rational stance to take, as F4I has, or is in the process of, selling their code to 4 other producers of CDs. Plus they had press released a new "improved" version of this UTICA inspired DRM enforcemnet, even before the Sony BMG code was discovered... And remember audio CDs have long lives. And this code breaks totally Windows versions later than XP (e.g. 64 bit Windows, Vista, etc.) So inserting a Sony BMG in your Personal Confuser in, say, 2008 could do even more damage than it does today!

Haven't installed P6 SR2 yet, but had same problem way back (a P5 beta after a PP re-install IIRC). (Realised issue reading this thread yesterday, but assumed it was obvious to all - sorry!) Poser doesn't use registry entries per se (it's a Mac app), which is probably why CL overlooked them. BUT, any application with a unique file type in Windows (eg. .pz3) has an entry (or entries) in the registry for the file type. You used to be able to fix this out-of-order install problem, by simply going to Windows Explorer > Tools > Folder Options > File Types > and look up the various Poser file extensions - starting with .pz3 of course - and changing them until you hit the one that the installer was using. Anyway, might be worth a try - esp. by CL who'll know which one it's look for - before a full re-install - ugh! CL probably made the issue more prevalent with P6 because instead of naming a .pz3 file a "Poser file" as was always done before, they renamed it to be a "Poser6 file."

CP passes the info of buyer to merchant even for freebie's. But CP is broke a lot, so the effect may be that it doesn't always send.

Fry's and/or their Outpost.com is only place I'm aware of since the lame-duck P5 came out.

It's EXACTLY Poser 4 - even down to still needing the 4.03 updater patch installed by the user post install to use on any modern PC ( > 1GB virtual mem - e.g. anything much over about 256MB of real RAM!).

It's really pathetic that a new poser artist is left to figure this out for themselves on a product (re-)released in 2004!!!

To explain the why behind what they said. Poser 4 and all prior versions use .rsr files for the library thumbnails (directly derived from the MacOS Poser version), and .bum files for bump files.

ProPack and later versions use .png and .jpg respectively.

Advantages? .png and .jpg are industry standards and thus viewable - and editable - in numerous graphic utilities. And with bump files .jpgs are minuscule compared with .bum files - more correctly .bum files are obscenely large, meaning they are often packaged as .jpg requiring an extra manual step on your part to convert to .bum files for P4. All this is avoided entirely using ProPack or later.

Lastly, there is evidence that MetaCreations incorrectly ported .bum file format when converted from MacOS to Windows, so that's another reason to go to .jpg bump files on the PC platform.

So if you only run p5 (or later) there is no reason or advantage to using the P4 versions. You can also delete all .rsr files in the libraries/ folders too - but only after you first check that a corresponding .png exists. (Poser ProPack or later will create a .png file from a .rsr if one does not exist, at the time that you first open the item within the library - but if you want to do wholesale conversions check out P3d0 utility from Sensoft.)

One big problem with comments is that many of the third=party add-ons are not comment-aware - presumably their authors were not comment-aware. In particular Tailor would never run with comments in the file. So vendors installing comments in cr2's would be well advised to place them only at the top of the file, where they can be easily found/erased if need be. IIRC // is a MetaCreations-added comment facility, # is a Alias Wavefront .obj standard, and can only appear at the start of a statement (i.e. not within multi-line one). And neither should be used as the very first line of the file.

Attached Link: http://poserpros.daz3d.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20488

starmage, Have you seen this thread? File folder icon trick only works in P5, but the Morph Dial space saver works for both P5 and P6. (You'll need to login to visit it.)

PSP CANNOT be used for editing Poser UI files. Poser uses an earlier format of PSD files, I believe, something like Photoshop 3 or 4. Photoshop or its decendent Photoshop Elements, respect this format. But PSP updates it and saves it out in the latest PSD format, which handles transpancy very differently, and results in a file which can't be read by Poser's rather old PSD file reader. This was determined back when we tweaked P5's library icon interface soon after it came out - see PoserPros Poser 5 forum for background.

I believe the appearance of seams is because the textures stop at the edge of the figure's template. (I don't have a Jessi seam template to compare, but it looks as if they do.) What happens I think, is that in preview mode the texture is scaled down drastically, and probably crudely as this is "only" preview. E.g. a sample of pixels is presumably taken and averaged down to 1 pixel. (Which would explain why larger texture maps seem more blurry in preview than smaller ones.) And at the very edges of the template non-image pixels are incorrectly sucked into the averaging process and thus the image, leading to a coloration error - typically a lighter banding. This would also explain why "hi-res" textures seem to exhibit worse seams, more scaling down would - if the theory holds - mean more off-image pixels sucked into the preview at the edges. This theory could be tested by changing the color of the unused portion of the map to black to see if the seams go dark. It's often said that good textures should not wash across the entire map, but I think there is something to say for careful overlap of the template edges. For best results they should be part of the image from the other side of the seam.

Re the upgrade - if you had CRPro I and found it useful, but perhaps a tad challenging to use (not Howard's fault, more a measure of the complexity of the task attempted), then you'll be VERY glad to buy the upgrade. Besides the feature improvements, it has numerous small changes throughout which plain make it easier and more intuitive to use. I assure you you'll find a few features in CRPro II that were there in CRPro I - just because they are so much more accessible now. If you have P6 you'll also want the upgrade, not just because CL/eF made some (oddball) design changes making CRPro even more necessary, but because P6 content was shipped in such an appaling state it really needs a CRPro pass before use! CRPro I will still work with P6, but won't be able to ferret out some of the wrinkles in the new stuff. BTW, Howard has his own store at www.hogsoft.com, if you catch my drift.

Sorry :-) Although your reply reinforces that it likely was NIH. NIH - a long standing term, often used in software industry, usually applied to the more arrogant - "Not Invented Here." Obviously used internally to the company ;-) Externally it usually permutates into something like "Design Choice." I'd hoped the SR1 fix would enable an alternate hack at least. But in SR1 they (re-)allowed larger than 91px, but still steadfastly ignore smaller than 91px. Bah!

Yeah, but instead they broke it, so you can't apply this to P6!!! NIH? See PoserPros for discussions on this at P6 release time.

What about your PMB file?