Hi folks.

Well.  I have been trying out Carrara 7 over at my friend's house before deciding whether to buy it or not.  Unfortunately  he doesn't have the 7.1.1 upgrade and doesn't want to do it until he gets more input on what if anything it has fixed.  In the meantime, I have gone back to using my 6.2.1 pro due to some pretty serious stability issues and such.  I built his machine last year and it's very similar to mine including software and OS.  So I can pretty much say it's an accurate test bed to see if 7 will behave the same on mine.  Right now I am not very happy with 7.  It crashes at the drop of a hat while rendering.  It's shader room is buggier than Cujo at a flea convention, and in general, it's just not behaving very well.  I can't tell you if it was that bad from the beginning because I didn't install it for him; Although he assures me that the install went without incident.

What I would like to ask is...

1.  Has there been a major increase in stability?
2.  Has the issue in the shader room been fixed (The error reads An error has occured in module ShadingModule.ccp Line 736)  After which the whole application gets progressively more unstable and finally crashes.  This happens about 75% of the time when editing shaders.

3.  Has the issue with the application hanging on exit been fixed?

I did notice one interesting thing that didn't happen with 6.2.1...

If doing a resource or time intensive operation, carrara will take so long that windows will think it crashed and pop up a close app window.  The odd thing is that the application hasn't really locked up, but it makes windows think it has.  If you just close the close app window, it goes away and then the same thing will happen multiple times until Carrara is finished with whatever the operation was.

Honestly, from what I have seen on his system, I doubt I will be buying 7 until it's a LOT more stable.  And yes I have tried it on Windows XP SP3, Vista Ultimate 32Bit, and Vista Ultimate in XP compatability mode.

Any info appreciated .

Typos included at no extra charge.