I have been having issues with my Poser 6 upon ints release. I have the graphics card and all the other specs it calls for and then some. I have been round and round with Curious Labs as well as Nvidia and Dell. NO one seems to know why this is happening. I can render with the OPen GL in every other program I run but Poser 6. If I open it and build a scene I can render with the previewer just find. But if I open any other things, including parameters, wham! I am frozen. Can someone give me an idea of something new to try? I have all the updates for everything on my system and Poser. I have uninstalled and reinstalled so many times it is getting annoying. It has never worked. From the moment I took it out of the box I have been having this issue. Curious Labs even sent me a new disk. Same problem. HELP!

Let's get this straight. You can start Poser 6, add figures and props to the scene, they show up in the preview window, and you can render. "But if I open any other things." What things? If you try File->Open->[anything other than a .pz3], no wonder that Poser doesn't work. You can import them, not open them. Or do you mean opening a window? You can't open the Parameters palette or the Grouping tool? That might be a Python related problem - many Poser windows rely on Pyton/Tkinter. I know there was a problem with some Python libraries in the initial Poser 6 release, one of the libraries was outdated and had to be replaced by the correct version from python.org. I haven't checked whether SR1 fixes that bug.

I was thinking Python. But I really do not know alot about them. I have all the runtimes imported. That is not the issue. My problem has been opening things like the render settings. I can open it but if I change anything from the original settings it freezes. If I open paramenter dials and them switch over to properties it freezes. I will check out the corrected Python from Python.org. I have SR1 and so far it has done nothing to fix this issue.

I am at Python.org and I am not sure what I am looking for. Can you help me find what I am looking for?

I can tell you this issue is NOT OpenGL related. Python uses the standard GDI to draw windows, in the end, everything that does something on screen without using DirectX or OpenGL uses standard GDI - even Java/Swing. So it might be a Tkinter problem, or even a Windows problem. What Windows version do you use? And when was the latest reinstall? I reinstall Windows XP Pro from the ground up on a fairly regular basis, about once every 6 months on my development machine, once a year on my rendering machine. Windows gets corrupted over time. Sad but true.

I use Windows XP. Are you talking about a total uninstall/reinstall? Or installing over the previous version? Dell did not think that it was a windows problem. They seemed to think that it was the application itself. So what can I try before I do a reinstall of Windows? I do not have an external drive right now so I would rather try something other than a total reinstall of Windows XP right now.

I don't think it's the application itself. If it were, most of us would have had your problems. And we don't. I can imagine you'd rather not reinstall Windows from the ground up. A clean reinstall of everything takes the better part of two days. But that is what I mean. Reinstalling Windows over an existing installation will not only preserve most of your settings, it will also preserve the corruption. So that won't work. If you've divided your disk in multiple partitions, the reinstall will be much faster, since you won't have to reinstall content - that is, if you installed the content on another partition than the system partition. If you only have a C: partition, you have to back up all your data to CD or DVD - a clean format before reinstalling is highly recommended. And partitioning the drive is also a very good move. I'd suggest three partitions: system (only Windows), apps and backup. I hope you have a 'real' Windows XP CD, not a system restore CD. Most computer brands only provide a restore CD (HP does, Acer does, that I know from experience. A good reason NOT to buy a brand computer). About the correct Python version: I think it was 2.2.1. But I can't find it right now. There was a thread about this issue in the Poser Python forum a couple of weeks back. You might find it there. Another thing - do you have Quicktime 6? That might be the culprit. For some things Poser still uses Quicktime if it encounters it on your system, and Quicktime 6 is a major piece of trash. Upgrade to 6.5.1 will help - uninstalling Quicktime won't, it'll leave loads of muck in your registry.

I will check it out and see if I can fix it. Thanks. And all I have is a resource CD that came with my machine.

Message edited on: 07/05/2005 22:27

The general recommendations for hangs of this sort are:

1. Make sure your application is up to date (and make sure any applications used by the main one are also up to date...in this case, the Quicktime 6 suggestion is a good one)
2. Make sure all your drivers are up to date. A bad driver is much more likely to cause a sudden reboot instead of a hang, but you never know.
3. Find out what else is running in your system. Run a spyware and virus scan and then shutdown things like virus checkers, messenger apps, etc. (not permanently, just close them while you experiment). You never know when someone's random app is inappropriately locking a resource that Poser might need in the system.
4. Make sure Windows is up to date. Use Windows Update to ensure this
5. Try creating a new account and running from there. Sometimes things get screwed up in user-specific settings and a new account is as good as a reinstall of Windows when that happens. Also, consider setting up this account as "Limited User" instead of an "Administrator"...many badly-behaved apps (both malicious things like spyware and just poorly written apps) will fail to run and consume resources when you aren't running as an Admin, and if one of those is interferring, this can help identify the problem.
6. If all else fails, reinstall the OS.

If, after a complete reinstall, you still have the problem, you should probably start looking into the possibility that something is wrong with the machine itself (though such a thing would usually show up in other apps, graphics apps like Poser do tend to tax your computer in ways that simply checking e-mail or browsing won't).

"I can render with the OPen GL in every other program I run but Poser 6." If your other programs work fine, I would not reinstall Windows...it's working. Given Poser's history of varying behavior on different machines, I'd say it's Poser. I have some serious problems with P5 and 6 while all my other software works flawlessly.