btw, if SM wants to pay me, I'll be happy to create a fresh drive partition, create a new windows install and start from there and track my steps as I install Poser 8 and see where the temp file creation actually begins. But honestly, I have better things to do with my time :)

The factors you've missed out of your list are the versions of IE and the Flash Player/Plugin (as these are effectively part of Poser's library system).
It's also possible that you've got stuff like Windows Defender that would have come in via Windows Update.<<

As I said, it was a clean install of Windows 7. From there I installed Vue 8 Infinite, then Poser. Whatever Windows 7 from microsoft turns on by default (win defender, firewall, IE8, etc) was loaded, yes. Windows 7 does NOT install Flash, but Poser may and of course if you open IE and visit almost any page you'll be prompted to install Flash.

So while I'm not going to screw around with my system to test it out (because I'm not paid to do so), it seems pretty easy to replicate the path... do a clean install of Win7, install Poser 8 and see what happens. Nothing? Kick up IE8 and install the latest flash. Nothing?

If one wanted to introduce Vue 8 Infinite that would be next.

That's basically all the items, software wise, that all that would be in the mix: Win7, IE8, flash, Poser and in my case Vue 8 Infinite. There's obviously sub issues like Win Defender yes but that's part of the base Win7 package. And the base firewall setups in Win7.

My point is... ONE of all of those are the key elements. Because one of those triggers the temp file creation.

to a relatively unique combination of factors which makes it much trickier to track down a solution.<<

I would tend to agree with that except for two things:

1. It happened on my Vista / 32 bit system. In and of itself that's not unusual and it could have been as you said, various factors... yet....

2. More importantly, About 1 month ago I reformatted my drive, installed Windows 7, 64 bit, totally clean install with no A/V or any external apps from say Dell or HP or whatnot. Just the base package from MS.

I installed two apps in this order: Vue 8 infinite. Poser 8.

Poser 8 immediately started creating these files.

The only "uncommon" factor here then is Vue 8 Infinite. There was absolutely nothing else installed except Windows 7.

I guess what I'm trying to say, kindly... is that I sort of feel like this is a tad bit more serious than just alot of files cluttering up drives. Maybe I'm totally wrong, but one of the first things I had written to SM early on was this MFT issue and at that point was only guessing. Now I have proof that at least on my system, it had the potential to destroy my drive in less than a year. Not joking.

Serious enough that, if it was >my< product or project I'd be thinking maybe of pulling the plug on the current method. Don't take that the wrong way. I have read everything written here and I do understand it's not SM or the programmers fault. I think it's something flakey with Flash/Flex and if was >me< I'd be on the phone with Adobe asking what the deal is.

But that's just me.

If nothing else I would suggest people using Poser use RAM drives for temp files or SD cards or removable USB drives. It's not worth killing your REAL OS drive for this.

I like Poser 8 alot (except light placement) and I want to see it succeed. That's why I'm posting. I am not bashing or complaining or trying to be annoying. I want this issue solved and move on. I think it's a serious issue.

Happy Holidays!

Ted, you said somewhere (and correct me if I'm wrong or misunderstood), but you said or implied that these temp files are written by the OS in some process, and that Poser is not writing them and is unaware of them being written.

That sounds reasonable and make sense. Sort of like the OS is writting out log files of all the communication.

If that is the case, it seems to me that if these files are removed while Poser is running, Poser should proceed as normal.. it doesn't know about them, doesn't use them, doesn't care. Correct?

I've noticed two things that don't make sense with that logic though:

1. If Poser is running and I delete all the files in my temporary internet folder, Poser freezes.

2. I mentioned that I had moved my temporary internet folder initially to a small removable SD card and reserved only about 10 megs for this, with the rest of the disk being used by readyboost.

a) I noticed several things... 1. the library update access was very slow and 2 in ran out of space very quickly and when it did, the library ceased to function.

So the question is, why does removing these OS chitchat files freeze poser and why would running out of space to store these files ALSO cause poser to stop updating the library?

I've been studying the impact of all these files on a RAM disk so as not to destroy a real drive. It's not simply an issue of lots of files getting written and maybe forgetting about them or deleting them later. There's an underlying adverse affect on the drive over time.

The biggest impact I'm seeing is growth to the MFT of the RAM disk (which I reformat or it gets reset when I reboot). 

Here's a typical 1 hour session

I have a 200 meg ram drive used to store temporary internet files. All these temp files are getting written to this drive... about 3 or 4 per second.

Within about 1 hour, approx 10,000 - 15,000 are created.

The total of these files adds up to approx 3 to 6 megs but actually takes up close to 30 megs of HD space because of the way a 1k file may take up a full 4k of cluster space. 

That's not that bad part though.

The bad part which I'm seeing is the growth of the MFT. The MFT grows as best I can tell, by about 20 megs as well in this 1 hour session because it has to write out 10,000 - 20,000 entirely new entries as it appears they are entirely random sequences each poser session.

So imagine the impact on a real drive with a real MFT. It's not the temp files themselves that's the long term problem. It's this MFT growth that eventually may be crippling. As far as I understand it, the MFT never shrinks, and entries for each of these files, while they may be zeroed out if the files are deleted, are still effectively a row of zeros in a huge spreadsheet.

And it grows 10k or 20k new rows each time poser is run and kept open for about an hour.

A typical internet browser session all day may write .. I dunno... 1000 new entries. Maybe. No big deal. I don't think any OS was meant or can handle 20,000 new files added and removed each day. That's 2 million entries if you start up and run Poser for 1 hour, and do that 100 times.

THIS is the part that ... while it's not affecting ME anymore... could be seriously killing other people's machines. The temp files will eventually get deleted. The MFT will not.

Ok... what part of this did I get wrong? :)

Ok, cool.

I went back into some of the temp files being written out and found a few items of interest perhaps.

index.dat contains several curious entries:

First line:
Client UrlCache MMF Ver 5.2 (the rest of the line is garbled)

Next was the I dug a bit into some of the other XML files that had more detail info. Info that actually has more than just empy type statements:

There were several files called simply "api[1].xml or api[2].xml and they contained entries such as:

Another entry in a different file (api[4].xml):

I think process explorer is the tool you need<<

Yes, that's what I was using. "System" was the actual processing specifically writing out these xml files.

I did notice this in one of the index.dat files:

Client UrlCache MMF Ver 5.2

I couldn't copy the whole line but it may be a clue.

Well I spent quite a bit of time trying to track down which, if any service or exe or whatever is actually writing out these temp files.

I did this by simply watching disk activity and what  process was writing out these new temp files.

The best I could figure out, of all the process writing out ANY disk activity, was that it was simply the "System" process that was tied to the particular temp files related to Poser. 

I saw other process such as the disk defragmentor, the antivirus app I DO have running now, search indexer, service host. exe, etc etc etc... basically everything reading or wrting out to the disk and specifically writing these files.

Basically with my browser open right now, and Poser, there's 7 processes actively writing out to the disk.

One of them is simply called "system" and this is what is writing these files.

Unfortunatley that really doesn't tell me too much.

What else have I tried?

Turned off Volume shadow copy + system restore.
Turned off firewall
Booted into a minimal driver mode (not quite safe but basically everything shut off including almost all hardware such as wireless cars, graphic and sound drivers. I started up Poser and still getting these temp files written.

Tried safe mode and now because network was entirely shut off, poser library didn't load at all (in told me a network connection was not avail and couldn't write out library, basically).

Tried turning off search index.

Nothing. Still seeing the files build up.

Baffling :)

You would think there would be a way to actually look at a file and see what process or application or service created the file. That might give some clue as to the path this is all taking. But I'm not smart enough.

means that the cache manager tried to delete the file, but couldn't, because some other program was using the file.<

If i had to guess it's not anti-malware but rather some service like Volume Shadow Copy or UAC that's preventing the file from being removed, or that's logging this entry and not preventing it from being removed.

I don't know enough about all the windows services to really dig too deep, but I know those two alone if enabled (and they are on most people's machines) can cause ... how do I phrase this... troublesome.... issues.

With UAC i've seen instances of applications not being able to permanently store config files or registration/serial/activation issues (Vue and others comes to mind). With VSS I've seen cases where files say they are in use but I know for a fact they really aren't. And of course you can delete them but you really aren't deleting them. Until they get deleted... hehe.... it's very weird.

And there's hundreds of services like this just on windows alone. Mac I don't know.

I know for fact I have windows defender off and no AV app turned on. (Win keeps bugging me about it too). I've also tried shutting off various other 'logging' type services but to no avail.

However, I will say I've NOT yet tried turn back off UAC and watched what happens with Poser. I'm sure I've tried it before but now I can't say for sure. Going to give this and some other ideas a try.

LOL. I know :)
I said "claims" to SM tech because I didn't want them to take it the wrong way like, "Hey, I spoke to the lead developer," or lead ui developer or whatever..  because really, I don't know what goes on back there, who does what where, why, or when  so I was playing it safe.

btw, this is what SM tech wrote back, "The files are part of Flash and are Temp Files."

That's why I originally mentioned about or brought up flash a few posts back. I didn't say it... SM did :)

A little follow up.

When I last spoke to SM about this issue, they seemed to indicate the build up of files (if it exists which they seemed skeptical of) happens, it would have little impact on system performance.

I beg to differ. I differ because of

(a) drive cluster size (1k stored on a 4k cluster drive (which is NTFS default) is taking up 4k.... not 1k.). So you may have 20,000 1k temp files that total 8 megs, but it can take up 70 or megs of drive space quite quickly.

(b) it's not an IE Cache or Firefox Cache issue exactly. Setting your IE cache to 8megs doesn't solve the problem, especially If you never run IE (like me).

This is my response to Tech:

I think you also found the reason why everone does not see this build up.. I only have 8MB of Cache on my system. if you do not have a large Cache, you will not see the build up. I have passed this on to the Project Team.<<

Well I have couple observations

1. The buildup of files can go way beyond the "Cache" limit of IE if IE is never run to effectively clean them out. For example I always have my IE limit set to 8 and Firefox to 0 (firefox doesn't use this same cache so it's not really relevant). Yet if IE is not run this cache can grow way up beyond 8 megs.

2. More importantly, because of the way the file sizes are (typically 1k) and because of the huge amounts of them, what I've noticed on various drive types and cluster sizes (NTFS and Fat and Fat32 trying various cluster sizes of 512bytes to 16kb) is that these files do not compress well even with drive compression turned on.

So while 20,000 1k or 2k files may add up to maybe 8 megs... that actual space they take up on a drive can be 50, 70, 90 megabytes because as you know, a 1k file stored under with a 4k cluster size takes up 4k.

THIS is why is DOES have a serious impact on performance. And disk fragmentation.

Now, as I said, the solution I've worked with using a 200 meg RAM drive. I've found that within 2 hours, 100 megs get gobbled up by these XML files. The actual size of the files is only about 10 megs or so but because of the issue above, it's take up huge amounts of space per session. If you don't run IE, they don't necessarily get cleaned out.

Why don't people see them? They are truly hidden, even with view system and OS files selected. You can only find them IF you know the random name of the folder within the temporariy internet files/ie5 folder.

I have spoken (via a message board) to the person who claims to be the "Quarterback" of this project. HE only realized last week he's getting the buildup as well. Right away all kinds of alarms and red whistles went off around me. This is a major problem. I'm not blaming The Poser 8 folk, but I'm not blaming the OS either. If there's any culprit it's Adobe product used to build this new interface in P8. P7 does not exhibit this issue. 

I'm truly convinced everyone's poser 8 writes these files. But not everyone notices them.

**>>I did some testing and found the cause to be Anti-virus software.

The few AV I tried all evoke the temp file generation in Poser8, including Windows Defender which comes with win7/vista.

One can exclude the Temporary Internet Files folder from real-time protection as an interim solution, but it is a fairly severe security compromise.<<

**I don't have any A/V software running, including Windows Defender.

Files are still getting written back and forth.
So, good theory, but doesn't work in my case.**
**

Why are you posting links to other 3D applications?

I was talking about figure creation or figure specific apps (you buy poser to create figures quicklhy and easily, you aren't buying or using Lightwave to specifically pose people/characters although granted, you CAN do that as well).

I was not refering to modeling or rendering and layout or scene building apps.

There's poser and there's Daz for straight out figures. Lightwave and all the rest are totally different beasts.

I used to work with Newtek (and lightwave) closely and helped (with Steve Worley) create numerous plugins such as Sasquatch (grass hair fur plug).

I hate when people assume you just got into 3D yesterday and Poser is the first program you've used.

I go back to TurboSilver, Digiview, Ham-e. Amiga. Caligari :)

That's where I'm coming from :)

I'll also be quite blunt though (and this is not on topic exactly) ... I don't think the new interface of P8 has helped the situation.

The library is still a pain in the uknowwhat to navigate through. You can now search for stuff which is great. But other than that I did prefer the old interface in terms of useability. The new one feels like I'm working in a web browser. The old one felt like an application on my computer. From a Poser user standpoint, I don't see much benefit to the big changeover. From a developer there may be valid reason for other application interoperability. But for me and just poser... I'm not a fan of it. Just an opinion though, same as if I was to look at two pictures: I like >that one, and not >that one. Doesn't mean one is worse than the other.

The "Library" is a hassle either way and I almost wish we could just have a plain old windows style navigator/explorer to wade through to manage all this stuff (and delete stuff too).

Still, the program otherwise is significantly better than p7 in terms of rendering and speed.