Wow, you answered, like, 3 questions at once, thank you so much!

Thanks to you I now have DSON (it's on sale for %100 right now).

I REALLY sppriciate that.  I've been out of the hobby for medical reasons for several years, so now I have to re-learn everything.

You just made that a lot easier.  Truly, thank you.  When i rise to power, you can be my Minister of Awesome Advice!

Oh, I don't have that installed...  Thankyou! 

I can't wait ti try out these suggesstions...  right now I'm handling schoolwork so I can't get to it just yet.

Quote - What happens if you switch the preview render mode to SreeD?  There is also some "box pick" setting specific to ATI that seems to be a common problem (search forum for those keywords).

It's not the render mode so much as when I'm posing the figures before the render.

It starts off fine when it's just the first nude model, but once I get its clothes on it slows down significantly, if I had another, hoo boy...

Last time I attempted it I had a Volg fighting M3 in GRIM armor (From Sanctum Art) in one of Stonemason's backgrounds, by the time I had them all added it was taking 30-40 minutes to move a trigger finger...

Quote - Your machine is more than adequate. What version of Poser?

If you have Poser 8 and it is slow starting up, untick the "Reopen Folders" box on the Library Options...

I have poser 7

Quote - Anti-virus programs are sometimes at fault, turning a snappy computer into crap.

I found that AVG Resident Shield was pigging up any program that I ran that had to look at the disk for any reason, generating thousands of page faults. This wasn't just affecting Poser. My browser was slow, my flight simulator took forever to load a scene, my software development tools acted like it was 1985, etc.

When rendering anything wiht large textures, this was really obviously a problem. Poser likes to convert textures into multiple levels of detail for mip-mapping. These are large, rapidly produced files binary files, but the anti-virus was examining them very slowly and not letting Poser do I/O quickly.

Try disabling any real-time disk sniffing stuff.

That could very well be the problem.  I installed Kasperski around the same time this started...  I'll try that first.

YAY!!  It worked!

Thannkyou so much!

Okies...  trying that...

Forgive me, I'm still pretty lame at all this...

How do I do that?

I finally fixed it by clicking on edit > Restore > Figure.

I had to completely rebuild the pose and re-adjust her claws, but I fixed the problem.

Yah, they said "There have been issues with V4 and the Creature Creator morphs resulting in the middle fingers and neck locking.

Here is a thread from the Commons about the problem and the fix(es):

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=78352

This apparently happened if the Creature Creator morphs were installed, but not necessarily injected into V4.
"

DavidGB also posted a download to zero the figure, which he said should help, but it's a D|S file, poser won't even read it.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=123818

and

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=78352

Quote - > Quote - Dang, that's a face only a mamma could love, LOL

Had to show that I was actually using the creature morph, didn't I?
I think I found the thread at DAZ about this.  It sounds like they are just locked so you should be able to unlock them.  If they are locked you can unlock each part by going to Object on the main menu and uncheck Lock Actor.
Also Les Bentley has a set of body lock poses for V4 that might fix this.
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php?item_id=55607

Sadly they did not work.  Her middle and index fingers on both sides are still locked up.

Thankyou chriscox, I'll try that and get back to you.

No luck.

It didn't work.

I understand completely momo...  I am extremely phobic of computer things in general, so learning to use poser7 has been an exhausting (but rewarding) exersise for me so far.

I've been trying using a tail from the creature creator on a V4.1 figure..

The Lekky are posable, and look great, but I can't get them to attatch to her head!  I can place them indivdually with each pose, but that's so annoying and time consuming...  I've tried everything that I can think of, but I'm still pretty new to poser, so I'm sure there's a way.

Incidentally PhilC's lekku are posable, you just have to grab them and drag them using the drag object.