Ok, first problem, I downloaded the new Yahoo Messenger (9 I think) and for whatever reason, it causes Poser to lock up and/or crash.  The lockups happen at random when YIM is open and I have to close it to get Poser to respond again.  It doesn't matter what the lockup is either, it could be opening a file, saving, rendering, switching menus, etc, it locks up EVERYTHING.  Then, sometimes when I close YIM after a lockup, it crashes Poser to my desktop.

Second, I recently defragged my hard drive after finding my schedule was never set to do it automatically.  After I had defragged several times, I notice Poser is very very sluggish to load and open some menus or to switch from the render screen to the preview screen.

Anybody else have similar problems?  Are there fixes at all?  I'm looking at a new main drive for my rig, so I may just start all over anyway.

I don't know about the hows or whys, but I noticed that YIM was slowing my system down, so I actually use Pidgin instead...plus, I can log into a ton of different clients (currently logged into 3) instead of running the programs

as for the defrag....I don't know why it would slow down your system.

If your drive is really old, it may have gotten worse with a defrag. Defragging is a fairly harsh process on an HDD (it moves huge amounts of data around on the disk, lots of sustained reading and writing) and if the drive is at the edge of problems, it can simply get pushed over with something like a defrag.

Try running one of the free S.M.A.R.T. tools and see if you get any warnings. If so, you may just have no choice but to get a new one before it dies entirely.

Also get a program like Glary Utilities and clean up your registry and defrag the registry. It also repairs short cuts, start menus and a lot of other defects.

yep yep, I use Registry Mechanic for cleaning out my registry and I use Diskeeper for my defraging but it's only Poser that seems to be slower than usual, none of my other programs seem to be infected with this problem.  oh well, maybe it's just time for a new hard drive

thankfully all my important stuff is saved on a backup drive :D

Your swap file is often not defragged because it is in use. Check your disk free space after the defrag , if its less than 10% you may have issues. In poser 7 check how many renders are cached and what your undo level is , either of those can take a big chunk of disk

well, I was able to make the required 20% free space for defrags, then it went to 21% after the defrag. 

My Max render cache is set at 10 and max undo is at 100

what would a good setting be for the render cache and the the undo level, I never touched either, figuring they were set at a certain level for a reason.

I keep my render cashe at 1. I don't see any real need to have a bunch of copies stored in the app. If you need them just save them to a folder somewhere else.

I only keep my undo at 5. More than enough for me. If you really need a few undo's maybe 10 max.

ok, cool, I'll play with it and see how it works :D