Has anyone noticed if putting runtimes one place works better than another place? Specifically, should I put runtimes in the Poser directory parallel to the "Downloads" runtime or is it better outside the directory Poser.exe lives in? What makes irt easiest for Poser to load stuff?

For all kinds of reasons it is best to put any additional runtime on another disk. This makes upgrading to another version of Poser and to another Operating System easier. It might even improve performance depending on your hardware. Nowadays Poser itself doesn't put the runtime in the same directory as the executable (modern OS's dislike writing into these directories as executeables are supposed to be inmuteable).

There is no objection to have as many runtimes as you need and seperating runtimes in ways logical to you make perfect sense. Even placing runtimes on removeable storage is possible and sometimes even recommended for those items you don't need often.

If you're using Vista or Windows 7 you'd be better off putting your external runtimes outside the program files folder.

UAC that's included in the latest versions of Windows is a bit fussy about users putting files into the program files folder, sometimes it'll let you put them in then refuse you access to them or it'll just refuse to let you put them in to begin with & crash your machine (it did with me anyway).

My external runtimes sit in a folder called Runtimes in the root of my C: drive.

Windows 7 64Bit
Poser Pro 2010 SR1

Thank you.

 All above is very right ... just place the Runtimes anywhere, but don't forget to add them to the Poser runtimes library ... or else Poser won't find anything from it ...

I almost NEVER use the Poser Libraries to load content but use Advanced Library (just Google to find it) ... it works without problems and makes finding things a lot (repeat: a WHOLE lot !) easier !