O.K. I really haven't fooled around with it much myself but when you're importing your model it's also importing the flat texture map which is what you paint on and then when you save it you can then view it on your model with Photoshop. In other words you can't paint directly on your model in a 3d view ala BodyPaint3d. At this point Photoshop's 3d capabilities are very rudimentary  and mostly only truely useful for compositing a 3d model into a 2d scene.

Photoshop for the past bunch of years has been updated approx. every 18 months so seeing CS3 was released April '07 I'd expect CS4 around October sometime.

Was more shocking for me when seeing them morph live in concert... amazing! a set and setting kind of thing for sure...

You might find that you'd find an answer on the Adobe Forums rather than here. Their forums have been very helpful for me in the past. Haven't up/downgraded to Vista myself... what version of AfterFX ? believe CS3 is the only version that's supposed run on Vista anyway.

Ummm.... not sure what your trying to do but maybe the write-on effect or animated stoke which can be done in after effects. Creative Cow has a few tutes that may help.

Images for lenticular prints can be masked  and combined using Photoshop you need to know the lpi of your lenticular film tho. The book "Photoshop 7 Magic" has a Tutorial on how it's done and her's a link with alot of info and believe they still offer SuperFlip if you get your lenticular film from them www.microlens.com/

Yahoo has a Lenticular Group also tho I haven't checked it out in ages , you should also google this subject as there is quite a bit of info out there.

Well  I've had a Toshiba M205 for a couple of years now and must say it rocks for 2d tho I haven't installed any 3d apps on it so can't comment about how well it performs in that area. Anyway it's got  an nVidia 6200 go grahics card so don't think 3d would be much of a problem depending on the program. Screen brightness is no problem and the pressure sensitivity is not an issue for me. Not sure what Toshiba has for newer tablets but at the time I got the M205 it was the only model with a dedicated graphics card.

About the only other brand of tablet pc I've heard mention of for artists is Motion and they are a slate not convertable. You might want to check out a few Tablet specific forums such as
www.tabletpcbuzz.com/

O.K. still think you were getting better answers in the Animation forum  and would be better off posting there but will answer this here. You'll find the opacity setting by pressing the letter T on your keyboard while the layer you wish to effect is active. Alot of questions can be easily answered by checking the manual or help file. 

Yes I use it a bit but think you might get more responses if you post in the Animation forum.

Well finally found the time to reproduce the sunrise animation from scratch and the sky brightening has not happened this time .Tho I still don't understand why it occured in the first place weird...

Not being much of an expert on Particle Emitters myself...tho I play around a bit and find Particle Illusion SE sufficient for my basic needs,layers would be nice but the work around to that is to render to a lossless codec and then rerender over that.

So have you tried the demo ?

Wondertouch  also has a bunch of tutorials and a forum I might suggest you check them out but anyway for $99 there is quite alot you can do with it.

Attached Link: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/