I haven't added any new software, done anything crazy, change the default prefs or anything... ...so Poser 4 crashes on me in the middle of zooming in with the camera. This isn't altogether uncommon, but what is uncommon is that after several cold boots (Win98), Poser always gives me a quick grey screen and then appears to exit, and every other time I try to open it it does the same thing. So poser is dead. Does anyone have any clues as to what could cause this before I reinstall? Thankee, hear? Gary Seven

Gary, zero clue mate... I've had the same on occasion.. to date I've re-installed about 5 times... Although, with me it was one or two figures that caused the meltdown... You might try taking the default settings for the start up... as I did modify them... but now it seems to come up ok... Hrrrrrmmmm.... I'm not sure.. but I think it might be either the main rsr or whatever the ini file is for the programme.. Shrug Thom

I've heard of this happening on NT and it also happens when there are TSRs on your machine like soundcard drivers etc.. -JH.

I am running NT 4 and I never had anyproblems with Poser. (Maybe I'm just lucky ;)  Oddball

Likewise, I'm running NT4 and have no problems with P4. I think the main rsr is probably corrupted. When you re-install, make a copy of it somewhere safe so if P4 goes bye-bye again you can just copy it over. I saved myself about 3 re-installs that way under WinDoze98 Paul

Hey, W'heezer, when you reinstall, try backing up POSER.EXE and POSER.RSR. I've had Poser crash that way, too and those two files are the ones that seem to get corrupted. If nothing else, it'll save you the the trouble of doing those reinstalls over and over.

Gary, What you are describing has happened to me with both P3 and P4 over the last year or so. It crashes, you reboot, and reboot and whenever you try to get Poser to run, it flashes briefly on the screen... but does not open. This happened with P3, P3patched, and now P4. It happened ALOT in Win95, much less often with Win98. I'm afraid the only 'FIX', in my case was a fresh install of Poser. It appears that at times the program .rsr gets corrupted, so many of us do a fresh reinstall... and as SOON as it's working again... copy the Poser.rsr to another area.. for safe keeping. I also copy the application ( .exe ) and data ( .dta ) as well... just for the heck of it. Then, the next time it crashes... I just copy the .rsr back and replace the original. Sorry... but that's the only way I'm aware of to correct the problem. If anybody else has ideas... I've been watching for it for a year or so on this board... but haven't seen one yet! Good Luck Bill BBay.com

See Legume... it took so long to type my reply... you answered before I finished. I remembered you and a bunch of us having the same problem months ago. :-) Bill (one finger typing wizard.. NOT) BBay.com

I've had this happen as well. I was able to get back up by installing poser somewhere else and copying the poser.rsr file and most of the root files over. Also delete the pref files in your poser prefs directory under runtime. They get corrputed as well. This means you'll have to set up some prefs but no big whoop. Also, sometimes rebooting does not clear the system. Sometimes you have to completely shut down and restart. File corruption is another cause. Try defragging your harddrive and running the check disc app. What can happen (in win95/98 apps) is temporary stuff remains in the swap file area when an app crashes. when the app starts up, the swap file still has the corrupted data and tries to load that. Since that caused your crash it bombs back out. Also, that zoom problem is something I found is tied to the display ground shadow setting. Turn the ground shadow option off. That should help your zoom crash bug. You should NOT have to reinstall all of Poser.

If it's a Poser.RSR corruption problem make sure you set it to a "read only" file after you restore it. -JH.

Thanks, all. I appreciate the pointers. The damnedest thing is that I was just about to burn the Poser vital files to a CD just in case... Thanks, -Gary