Good stuff. Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow

After following Geeps advice, it might be a good idea to save the pose on one of your 9 pose dots so it is available at any time from your worktop.

I have a 250gb Maxtor external hard drive which uses USB 2.0 (and firewire). I copied the complete curious labs, poser 4, runtime folder onto it and then made a shortcut to the poser4.exe file and put it on my desktop. I did run Correct Reference, available in freestuff, and it seems to work fine. I use this for "experimentation" and keep poser on my C: drive for Sunday Best.

When you selected the P4 render option in Poser 5, did you check the "ignore shader trees" box? It needs to be checked every time you start Poser is you want to get close to P4 PP renderer.

You can create a folder outside of the libraries, i.e. in your textures folder or anywhere on your computer and put little used pose folders into it. I call mine Pose Archive. The PD30 free explorer can then be used to view them. It is just a matter of copying and pasting them back into the pose folder when wanted. pboost is good if you can get the hang of it.

I put all my Victoria 3 Injection Morphs into a single folder in my Pose library, called it V3. Occassionally a character cr2 can't find it. I just open the cr2 in wordpad and do a search and replace to insert the new injection folder location i.e. V3 and then resave it. Seems to work OK for Michael 2 as well. Other than that, it seems to work fine.

You can safely delete most items. You do need to take care over the geometries, however. Geometry props, lights, deformers, etc will need to be kept. You will also need to keep P5 Don and the library file for him to use in the Walk Designer. Also, in textures keep the ground default texture or replace it with one with the same name. I suggest you back up your complete runtime into a different folder and keep it in reserve.

I have edited Poser4+Pro-pack down to the bare essentials - around 80 mb in total. As you have done Butch, I have removed all the P4 characters but the Daz Vicky/Mike/Milkids which I use. The only item I have kept is the Poser 4 Lo man as he is needed by the Walk Designer. I keep a zipped up copy of this basic runtime ready to drop in for any new project. My zips are burnt onto CD for safekeeping and I unzip them all and arrange them into ready-to-load runtime folders and then re-zip them onto a separate CD. I keep an excel file with a picture of what each contains with a hyperlink to each zip from the picture so I can quickly assemble a range of items for a particular project. Items like pose files I unzip and keep on disk and use PD3O explorer to locate what I want to use quickly. I am currently editing out P4 stuff from Poser 5 and keep only the P5 stuff and Victoria 3 on it. On a spare hard drive I have around 6-7 gb of textures/tools/etc. Props you can import from anywhere but I find my hair folder is still a little large.

I use Winzip to zip up Geometries, libraries, etc separately. (currently around 6.5gig total). It's just a matter of putting all the pieces back together later. I have found CD-R to be a reliable medium. I have have some very flaky results using DVD-R/RW disks - they sometimes have difficulty with nested files giving a lot of zero byte folders. Until they are more reliable I should stick with CD-R's or invest in a second hard drive.

I have had the same problem. It seems the same for Victoria 1 and 2. If you go to Bloodsong's site at 3dMenagerie there is a free file in the goodies section which gives you some easypose options for moving the cloth around. Still doesn't help you conform the cloth though.

Rhiannon, you can usually turn off parts of the clothing package in the heirarchy editor - depending on the item it works better for some items than others.

I have installed P5 to my "D" drive but it has written files onto my main "C" drive. After a monumental crash trying to get it in, I did a format and re-installation. The challenge code was still there afterwards. I read somewhere in the forum that the protection system is based on the serial number of your main drive and that only a low-level format (filling the drive with zero's) would remove it. A disk image would only work on the drive that you originally installed on and got a response code for... there would be no point in having a protection system if this was not so. A possible solution to keeping Poser seperate from the rest of your programs would be to have two hard drives with Win2000 installed on both of them. You could keep one for P5 and get a code for it, etc and boot up into the system to use it. For your sanity's sake, get the CL updates and apply them before using P5 - I have had no problems since doing so. If you have two drives available, there is no reason why you could not back up your complete Runtime folders to it at regular intervals for both P5 and P4. I currently do this and have separate Runtimes for posette, victoria and experimental stuff. However stuffed and unworkable the original gets, you only have to delete it and replace it with a tidy back-up copy. This helps prevent your finger wearing out scrolling down the MAT/Pose files.

I looks as if the chap's feet are there but are embedded in the ground. Go to Display on the top task bar and select drop to floor.

I have both installed on the same machine - P4 + Pro-Pack and P5 as separate installations. I have linked the P4 runtime folder to the P5 program but still use P4 for the majority of my work until I get accustomed to P5 (about 3 years hence)