I use Pinnacle Studio and love it. I stopped using anything from Roxio when their nifty sidebar gadget kept crashing the sidebar. It's a cool gadget but pretty useless if it's always crashing.

You can right click the install icon and click "run as administrator" as well.

^ Lol, very honest man. I use Vue extensively, I wanted to add characters to my Vue scenes and I didn't want to spend months modeling from scratch. Poser was the logical choice. Then I got into making scenes purely in Poser. Ryan Bliss' amazing images on digitalblasphemy.com were my inspiration getting started with 3d art.

Lying during an interview is not only grounds for immediate dismissal but in this state it is considered insubordination and you would loose eligibility for unemployment compensation. I'd think twice about that.
 
The cold hard truth is with double digit unemployment in many states there is a huge pool of experienced labor available. Employers have the luxury of being very picky who they hire these days and many people are taking jobs for which they are way over qualified just to make ends meet. I feel for you, good luck with your search.

Ok figured it out. The lights were set to "depth map shadows". I changed it to "ray trace shadows" and bam, shadows!! Woot!!
 
Thanks for everyone's input,
UC

I've tried replacing the lights in the scenes with my own. They wouldn't inherit the settings from the original light would they? I've honestly never checked that.

I'm importing the scenery into a scene I've already started but I'll check the render setting to see if the import is futzing with the render settings.

Thanks for the tips,
UC

I keep all critical data on a second hard drive. My primary hard drive only contains the operating system and installed programs. The second hard drive is backed up weekly to another hard drive so I always have two copies of everything. I've had too many CD's and DVD's fail to trust them to anything critical. To MLP, I've had those flash drives fail as well, seems kinda scary to me. Huge hard drives are pretty cheap these days for peace of mind.