Some folks have been reporting problems with D|S crashing and never loading... this has often been traced to the video card driver. If you get this problem, what you'll have to do is get rid of the default Microsoft-supplied driver, and replace it with one that actually works worth a $#@! :) If you have a Dell, Gateway, or other major computer seller's product, then go to your computer seller's website and get the latest video card driver from them. If you have a locally-built computer, an off-brand computer, or one you built from scratch (like me), determine what kind of video card you have. In Windows 2k and later, right-click on the desktop, pull up the Display Properties, then go to the Settings Tab. Once there, click on the "Advanced" button, and in the window that pops up, click the "Adapter" tab. Your video card info should be listed. Otherwise, if you're not sure, check your documentation that came with the computer, or open the case and look at the card; it should have some sort of label or printing on it telling you what you have. If you have a TNT2, Viper, GeForce (whatever variety), or similar, go to www.nvidia.com and get the latest driver (they have a menu guide that will help you select the best one.) If you have an ATI Radeon or any ATI-based product, go to www.ati.com and use their menu as well. If you have something else, err, you may have to go looking. Check with the folks who assembled your computer to be sure, and shut the thing off before you go cracking the case open. :) In either event, once you install the new driver, then uninstall D|S, reboot the machine, and re-install DAZ Studio. From there, you should be good to go. HTH, /P

Don't tell me every time I update my video driver I have to re-install DS!

No - I just added that in as a precaution. In all honesty, there is no real need to constantly update your video driver in the first place. Once you get a version of driver that works well with what you have, keep it... it'll prevent your registry from corrupting nearly as quickly. (BTW, video card drivers have nothing to do with security, nor do they really improve by too much once the card itself has been out for more than six months. There are exceptions, but they are rare at best.) HTH, /P

Well.. Dodger and I have an ATI Rage based card, and he drivers are certainly very up-to-date. Still the crashes happen constantly and Dodger's only gotten one successful render. Interestingly enough, that was of his own mesh (the dwarf wip at beta 4)

The ATI drivers have been updated every couple of months and for certain programs the continuing updates have been very neccessary since the early drivers for the new ATI cards were not very good.

Ditto on the every-time-I-try-something-it-crashes with a matrox card. Seems that Daz use predominately gForce nVidia graphics cards judging by the problems encountered by older Vanta-based (TNT2 et al) nVidia, ATi and Matrox users... A solid (vs transparent) adjustment sphere in front of every selected actor is a real deterrent to successful posing! Hopefully they'll make the adjustment spheres a configurable option for a cleaner interface for those who prefer to just adjust dials, then perhaps I can use it. Looked fairly good otherwise. I note that you can move all windows other than the scene window onto a 2nd monitor as free-standing windows in order to get a huge scene window. Unfortuantely the ui settings aren't saved (yet?) - and all the .daz file formats are binary so no way to easily cheat that. This latter design decsion may turn out to be an ultimatly limiting factor for the product - where would Poser be today if the file formats had all been proprietary rather than open Wavefront Obj stored in simple text???