Brooke...tried defragging (even tho my system does it weekly anyway) no dice. also moved my swap file to a different drive which has more than 10G's contiguous free space still no luck. I'm thinking the file I'm working on may have been corruupted in some way. I think I'll redo it from a past incremental save and if that doesn't work i'll reinstall Poser 5 but not SR3 I think I have SR2 backed up somewhere on a CD. Thanx for the input any other flashes of divine insight please post 'em. Thanx DrJest

I'm having the same exact problem. poser never gets to the rendering. It hangs while doing the shadow map. I cut done the amount of lights casting shadows. (3 only 1 casts shadows) and it now hangs while adding objects. I'm running XP with 512 MB and a 1G athlon. Task manager says i have tons of memory left 300 MB+ it also says poser still uses about 97% of the cpu cycle for hours on end. It does not tell me that poser has stopped responding. This problem did not appear that I now of before SR3. I've played with just about ever setting there is. PS this is using the Firefly render not the older "poser" renderer.