I have Poser 5 and it does really wierd things. It runs along fine and then for no reason whatsoever, it just seems to "lose" files or something. Case in point. The otherday I was merrily working with V3 and various character addons for her. No problems injecting morphs. Today however, is another story. I tried to inject full body morphs for a character for V3, and my computer hung up to the point I had to use CTRL ALT DEL to shut down Poser. In the window it showed 98 to 100% CPU usage. I thought it was the character package. Then I tried a character addon that I had used last week, and couldn't inject the morphs for that one either. I tried another favourite that is frequently used, and the same thing; my computer hangs up while Poser searches. I don't get a message saying unable to locate a file or anything, it just hangs. I tried recopying the !DAZ folder to the main Poser 5 runtime folder...even though I hadn't touched any files in it, or installed any files either. Recopying it didn't work. I even went so far as to reinstall the head and body morph packages, and that didn't fix it either. So now I've uninstalled Poser 5 and am reinstalling it again. This has happened to me 2 times in the last 6 weeks or so. I also had to reinstall it again last week for a different problem. I was using WW and kept getting the message for every convert about "no CR2 file found", even though there were plenty of CR2 files on my computer and in my Poser library. Are these known issues? It's starting to piss me off royally. I am not in a position to spend money on an upgrade, so I have to stay with Poser 5. Has anyone else had such problems?

Oh yes, I use Poser 5 to compress my files, not sure if that is a factor. I'm not going to compress the !DAZ folder this time just in case.

I have some of those problems daily, there are certain things I do that will occasionally cause Poser to hang (a batch injection of morphs is one, sometimes loading a figure). It loses track of files too occasionally, but finds them again after I shut down the program and re-start it. A couple of times, Poser has lost some of its basic components it needs to load, and I've had to re-install Poser. There is a patch to Poser 5 available from e-Frontier- actually 2 patches- that may fix some problems. I don't know because I keep forgetting to run the patch again after re-installing Poser (and now that I'm reminded, I'll do that now). Otherwise, it's just part of my expectation that Poser is going to hang sometimes. So I have learned to save work early and often. Poser is a memory hog. Windows has always been poor at managing memory (XP is so much better than 98 in that area, but it's still not great). And I often ask Poser to do things on my Little-Computer-That-Could that should really be done on a more powerful computer. Thus I've just learned to deal with the occasional hang as a fact of life. If you find better answers though, I'll watch the thread, because I would always like to optimize things more. (Yesterday someone posted advice for optimizing memory management in Windows, that was useful.)

Poser has a bit of a memory leak. You should re-start it once in awhile, to free up the memory.

I've never had any of these problems, except when I tried to be clever and moved the injection files. Apparently, the very first versions of these get really unhappy when they're moved. Other than the thing going completely bugfuck when I did something stupid, it's been stable.

Reboot your machine at least once a day, and before a Poser session. I even close down and restart Poser in between scenes. Once you have loaded stuff and started applying mats and changing you mind and applying other mats etc.... save the scene, close Poser and start a fresh session, frees up memory and just seems to work better.

Alternatively, you might just have hit a bad set of sectors on your hard drive. If possible run disk-check program to identify them and clear them up. Also, run a de-fragmentation program. A couple of years ago I experienced similar problems. In my case it turned out that the HD was on its way out, and needed to be replaced. Alas, I found that out too late, and a lot of stuff that I had on the failing disk was lost. Keep a CAREFUL check on the integrity of your hard drive! Cheers, Diolma

How do you optimize the management of memory in Windows XP? It doesn't sound like a bad idea to do.

Someone else posted this a few days ago, I don't remember where. But the one tip was to go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced (tab) -> Settings (button for performance) -> Visual Effects (tab) -> Adjust for best performance (radio button). On default, before you change it, it was probably on the Adjust for best appearance option. Yes, Microsoft thinks that it is better to look good than to work good, and they are certain that's what their customers want as well. The immediately noticable effect is that the Windows XP theme changes to the old Windows 98 theme (less attractive buttons, icons, etc.) Apparently though the snazzier OS interface on Windows XP takes up extra memory. I don't think the change is making a huge difference- except that I do have a bit more screen space with the Windows 98 theme, which I prefer.

I love the way old windows 98 looks. I only switched to Windows 2000 last year on my desk top, and refused to use my laptop that has XP home on it, until last fall. I had the laptop almost 2 years and had used it perhaps 6 times prior to that. My desktop can't handle Poser, so I moved to my laptop. I got used to XP, but hate the look of it. I looked through the posts and did find the thread. I also turned off indexing, which seems to have sped things up. I was wondering what that indexing was and nearly turned it off a few weeks ago, but was afraid it was important and that I would break something if I did, hehe

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Question, could these problems have been the result of a failing motherboard?  The motherboard on my computer "blew up" this past  April, but in 2005 I had lots of miscellaneous troubles with various programs and had to reformat a few times.