FireFLAW ?!?!!! Bwahaahahaahaa.... Excuse me, (Wipes half-chewed food off monitor). This has definitely made my day... thanks Tim. Just to add to the debacle: I use a well maintained dual-Xeon (2.4 GHz X 2) with a couple gigs ddrRAM and an nVidea Quadro4 XGL card, ... all of which means squat to Poser. It packs up on me constantly even with the default P4 renderer and won't handle more than a couple characters. Sorry I don't have better news - rendering in layers re:Stewer's suggestion is the way to go. Throwing a lot of money at the computer is probably not going to help - Poser does not use multiple processors and has no support for 3D accelerated video cards. I'm going to look at BodyStudio as an alternative and pass the render off to a different app. Oops, gotta go - Poser just choked on another render. Can everyone say "CTRL-ALT-DELETE"? I knew you could :-) Ian.