Thanks for your continuing help Q. As far as the dinging, I figured out that it was my screen saver. I had it turned off, as I have heard that is a good idea when rendering things. HOwever, when it was set to go to screen saver mode (at 15 minutes of inactivity) I would get the ding. At least on mystery solved! I just made a new 150 frame movie, w/out mimic, but using the BG textures and it worked. I'll try again by adding a mimic pose now (I also rendered at 160 x 160 instead of 320 x 320 to try to speed things up a bit. Don't know if that would have an effect on the actual success or failure though) I'll post my 'testing' results when I get them. thanks all. K

The only real difference is that the 'failure' uses some textures for the floor and background. I used them also in a short 30 frame try and it worked OK... very strange.

You know, I was about to say 'No, I haven't installed any new media players recently.' However, I have just started getting messages from RealMedia when I first boot up, and coincidentally, it seems to be about the same time as this problem started. Do you think that could have something to do with it? (I've often had problems with RM stuff in the past. Not sure why it started showing up again,but I'm going to go get rid of it.) As for your other suggestion, yes, I did re-render a 30+ movie last night, and it worked fine (again, as it did the first time before this started), but then I tried a new movie, and got the same problem of it just stopping on the final frame... Another question: where do these partially completed files go? I started a frame by frame job, got to about frame 80 of 200, then 'apparently' ran out of disc space. Where did those 80 .psd files go? Also, in the past I had been able to stop an AVI job in progress, and I would get the AVI file up to that point. No longer though... Thanks for any and all help! :)

yup, I tried that too. forgot to mention that part, but thanks ;-)

I'm not sure about the latest service pack; I'll check. The animation is 220 frames @12 fps.

OK, ready for a REAL newbie-Q?...

I used the term 'render', but now I'm not sure I used it correctly. When I 'make movie', I get a status bar sayin "Writing AVI Movie: Frame xxx" When I was playing with some smaller attempts, as soon as that was done, my media player would launch with my mini-movie. Currently I see that it has reached frame 220 (last frame) and it has been stuck there for about an hour. My task manager shows my CPU usage at 100%, but MEM usage is low. Is this normal, or am I crashed (it's running on a different computer than this; it's the only thing going). I do have some textured walls and floor going in the animation, four lights with some shadows, some camera movement. Is that the issue?

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I'm doing my best searching the boards etc. for answers already posted. I truely do appreciate the help.

K