Would also be good if the character/prop/etc files could optionally be stored as just modifications to a base file, so that I can, for example, create several copies of a character wearing different sets of clothing, save them away for future use, and then have any changes I later make to the base figure propagate to all the saved versions when I load them.

Then you just need to get Metacreations to sell you a copy of Poser for Alpha NT... Certainly Alpha NT used to run x86 programs, but only by using software emulation of x86 instructions; there's no point buying a faster processor and then using it to run a slow emulation of an x86 chip! Incidentally, it would seem odd for Bryce to go back to being just a Mac program, as I presume that they have a huge PC user base now. Certainly my copy of Bryce 2 is running on a PC, not a Mac, and I've been thinking about buying a much more up-to-date version.

I started out with 128MB of RAM on Win98, which was fine for simple images, but swapped like crazy with complex scenes. I just added another 128MB and it's now much happier.

Now, does anyone out there have a Posable Rusty Old Clunker available?

I've had problems with Adobe Photoshop LE refusing to load some JPEGs which came with poser downloads, but Poser itself (with the 4.0.2.118 Beta patch) has handled everything I've thrown at it, including those JPEGs. Paintshop Pro opened them too. I have had to kill Poser once since installing the patch a week or two back, when it sat for five minutes doing nothing and not responding to mouse or keyboard at the beginning of a render; but it can take so long to start rendering complex scenes on my machine that I don't know whether the software had locked up for good or was just thinking extra hard!