I've encountered my first Carrara problem, and it's a doozy. When I try to smooth an object in the Vertex modeller, I get a hang or a crash. I've reproduced the problem a number of times. The first time it happened, I had a modified sphere in the modeler. Lots of additional vertices, but it rendered like a geodesic dome. So I set Smooth on, left it at 1, clicked convert, and C5P shut down. Just gone and no wave goodbye. Second time, the same thing happened. Then I tried it with unmodified spheres, which are basically geodesic domes rather than spheres. VERY low-poly. Instead of shutting down, it locked up when I clicked Smooth, BEFORE I clicked Convert, and I eventually (after as much as fifteen minutes) would close it in Task Manager. According to TM, just selecting Smooth kicked my CPU to 100% permanently. Carrara was only using 80Megs of RAM at the time. This happened a few times, then I tried the same procedure with a cylinder. The sphere doesn't even get subdivided before the hang. With the cylinder, the mesh was altered when I hit Convert, and then the app hung. Five minutes, then I killed it. I looked in C4P, and first off, the sphere comes in smoothed, with 3-4 times as many polys as the C5 sphere. Even so, the Smooth function works just fine. My computer is a 2800 Sempron with 2 Gigs of RAM and hundreds of Gigs of free HD, running W2K. So what gives? Any ideas? I have had huge scenes in C5 (the biggest I've looked at was a PZ3 with Miki and V3, totalling 825Megs) with no hiccups. I'm pretty worried, because frankly, the Vertex modeller was the whole point, and this is a heck of a note an hour into learning it. M