OK, thanks very much.

I think that you are right.   The colour picker is unfeasibly annoying, at the best of times.   Thanks.   The weird thing is that I have carried on using it for years (and banged my head against the wall every time).    The odd thing is that, whereas, up to now, I was constantly picking up grey by mistake, presumably because that is Poser's background shade (which I have been too lazy to change in any of the last six or seven releases), now I always get grey.   

Yes, dumping the picker sounds like much better advice than re-installing.   Thanks, again.

Many thanks for your reply.  

But did they actually see things in different way, because of differences in their eyesight, or in their brains?    That's why I think it's relevant to Poser, because some Poser textures drastically differ from others, but in technique, not quality  (i.e. they seem to get the same resul, in totally different ways.   Just as those painters did a great impression of water, in totally different ways, Poser artists choose fairly radically different ways to portray people, but the best end up deceiving the eye just as well, regardless of technique.

I think I prefer A3 to A4, too, but TY2 is better than either of them    I used to use A3 a lot, but TY2, plus Wardrobe Wizard (especially WW2), plus the RDNA and/or D3D morphs, beats A3.   I have never taken to A4 at all.

Would that be because the posing camera and face camera always focus on the currently selected figure?   If you move the main camera forward or back, the calculation for Poser is pretty simple.

I was experimenting in Poser Pro, to try to re-create this, and found that having "Enable hardware sharing" pretty well seemed to disable rendering - that's why I thought it might be relevant.   I don't use OpenGL normally, because I get all sorts of problems.   With SreeD, M4 looks OK in preview and renders OK for me in Poser Pro.  

My default character is TY2.   Switching on "Enable hardware sharing" has the same effect on her, so it may not be a problem specific to M4.   (I specifically installed M4 in Poser Pro, but TY2 is installed in the Poser 7 run-time.)

You don't need "enable hardware shading" on for that. That setting is for advanced OpenGL features.
Looks to me like you have the document or the figure set to flat shaded. Document Display Style by default at the lower left of the interface.

That doesn't explain why it renders like that.

"Enable hardware sharing" is an option under the "Preview" tab.

Render settings ===> Preview (lower left)

Do you have "Enable hardware shading" on?

Vue:  www.e-onsoftware.com/     Although it costs a lot less than some of the 3D applications out there, Vue isn't a trivial purchase (xStream lives up to its name in that respect).   I think that there is still an upgrade path from the basic packages to the ones with the wider range of features, e.g. Infinite, so that you can expand the capabilities of Vue over time.

In Display ==> Preview Drawing, do you have OpenGL Hardware selected, or SreeD Software?   If OpenGL, switch to SreeD and see if that helps.

Saving before the render won't stop the problem, but it does minimise the potential damage.   

I have no idea why problem #2 is happening, because the top that renders doesn't even share the geometry of the EW top.

The problem with opening previously saved files may be due to using external binary morph targets.   Go into **Edit ==>  General Preferences ==> Misc ** and check the setting of "Use external binary morph targets".   If it's switched on, you should switch it off.   (I don't think you can rescue files previously saved with this option switched on.)   

Well as far as making first impressions goes, starting a thread "CENSORSHIP blah blah" is probably not optimal.

Why?   Who dictates what is suitable material for a starting a thread for the first time?   If the subject matter is acceptable, the subject matter is acceptable.    You don't have to comment on it, or even to read it.

I think the first problem is a memory issue.   Poser isn't very clever at handling memory, especially at discarding memory which it no longer needs, so it can acquire loads of memory during a render and then try to acquire even more, when you attempt to switch back to Preview, rather than making full use of the memory it already has.   Sometimes, the full set of textures will eventually load, but I think it is safest to shut down Poser and start again.   For that reason (and quite a few others), it's always safest to save the file before doing any kind of render, in my opinion.  

As for the EW problem, the blue top certainly doesn't look remotely like the Rhiannon version.    Is it possible that your runtime contains a mixture of two Elsas:  Elsa Wylde and, perhaps, some freebie called Elsa?   I can't see how the EW top could ever end up looking like the blue image, otherwise.   The EW top does load OK for me (V4.2, PoserPro, same version of Windows).  

Possibly something by dburdick, in the marketplace here?