my poser is getting a little tired... it's acting strange. Okay, I admit that it's grown to 5 Gigs. But it's in it's own partition on a second hard drive that's 6 gigs. When I open it up it goes right to the document window, with no document or any tool on the screen. Just the toolbar.I hit either open (pz3) or new, and that's when it goes thru the opening screen. Also, I just started seeing little artifacts of opened windows (render, render matls, loading a new texture, etc.) sticking out beneath the rendering window. Doc, how long do I have to live? Thanks for all the help

This tape will self destruct in five seconds!

in your runtime/prefs directory is a preferedstate.pz3 file. You could try deleting that. It will reset you poser to its default settings but it may get you in. Another thing would be to backup your poser.rsr file in your runtime directory then delete it and let poser recreate it.

Try this first:-
Go to Edit/Preferences and select both Factory State options, then restart Poser.
If that fails then reinstall (and re patch). You will not loose custom files provided they do not have original Poser names. (if you are not sure do a back up)