The more I learn about photography the more I've been playing around with lights lately in poser.  But I've run into a problem where I can only add a certain number of lights before they just don't "work" any more.  I can add more, but they don't light anything in the render or preview.  It looks like the limit is 8.  It does not seem to matter if they lights are turned on or off.

Is this something other people have run into as well?  Or is this maybe something odd with my graphics card?  I'm running P7 under Windows 7 (but also ran into this running in Vista).  I can't find anything on this on the SM support site.

The preview limit is imposed by OpenGL.
Other than that all lights should render, in fact using a large number of very low level lights was a way of (poorly) simulating global illumination in P4/PP.

Read the manual.  Limit is 8, and this also applies to PoserPro.  Even if we did have the luxury of increasing the number of lights we will run into tremendously long render times.  A totally unacceptable option. 

I did read the manual, back in P5.  Guess back then 8 seemed like enough so I didn't commit it to memory.  But to your point, long renders are not a good enough reason to limit us to 8 light sources.  Yet another way this software seems to be behind... apparently even the "pro" version.  Thanks for the info all.

You can use as many lights as you need in your scene, with the only limitation being your system’s resources. - From the Poser 7 manual. There is an Opengl limit on preview.

Hm... I wonder then if something funky is going on with my graphics card.  They do not show in render or preview.  I'll be upgrading my graphics card soon.  I'll see then I guess.

"funky ... graphics card"

Repeating - there is no light limit in rendering, and your graphics card has nothing to do with rendering, unless you accidentally asked Poser to use the Preview Render engine for your
actual render. Most people only do this for animation.

The OpenGL hardware accelerated Preview Render engine cannot do more than 8. I'm absolutely certain that the software renderer can do way more than 8. I have experimented with an array of 16 spot acting as an area light and had no trouble.
 

I did a scene with 9 spotlights to check . With a lot of lights it can be hard to see just whats happening.

I can send you the scene file if you want to try it . just pm me a email address .

heres a pic of 9 spotlights , angle 10 degrees  just to show the lights work.

 *I've been playing around with lights lately in poser.  But I've run into a problem where I can only add a certain number of lights before they just don't "work" any more.
* 
HI !   Not sure how long you have been working with lights in Poser- but I just  thought I would throw this out there- if you are not doing something really funky  where you need some kind of specific wild effect from  a lot of separate lights, I was just wondering if you have yet created your own angular maps  for IBL lighting, into  which you can put a lot of light coming from different locations around the room. A good single IBL can  do a lot of your lighting for you.
Downside I might see based on your OP is that you will not get a true view of what your IBL is doing in the preview window.

3 balls have 3 spotlights on each, red, green, and blue. The 4th ball (lower right) has 4 white spotlights. And there is a white IBL. That's 14 lights and I can see the light, shadow, and speculars from all of them.