I'm running Poser 4.03 and it's developed a really nasty habit. Often when I go to render something the least bit demanding, Poser will simply freeze. When I say demanding, I mean something like Mike or Vicky with one of the more complex hair props. Anybody else run into this? I'm running a PIII 500Mhz with 384MB of RAM so I think my machine has the oomph to handle the job, but maybe not. Maybe I just need to grin and bearing until I can upgrade my system to 1.6GHz Athlon with about 1GB of DDR RAM. What do y'all think?

Make sure you save the pz3 before rendering. Then just close and re-open poser between renders to avoid crashes.

Problem with that solution: When I have two millenium figures loaded with the null loader to avoid the crosstalk problem, this lasts only until I save and reload the file. Up all of the morphs I applied are suddenly screwed up with no way to get them back. I would prefer a fix instead of a workaround.

You might have to live with it. I have the same problem with 500mb DDR athlon etc. Tried XP pro and it made no difference Have gone back to win 98. I am just about to give up untill poser5 comes out, as life is too short. Allowing that most things are going to be different in Poser 5 it almost makes Poser4 a waste of time .

What about the Pro Pack? Any help there? Maybe I'll just use Poser for posing and do my renders in Bryce.

If you're running Win9x, you might try running a freeware app like MemMax, MaxMem or rambooster to see whether your RAM is getting lost in the memory hole. I still get occasional feezes, but far fewer now that I can monitor and control the RAM allocation.

First be sure it is indeed frozen. With Mike or Vicky it can take an amazingly long time for the render to actually start. The machine appears to be frozen completely. With low memory or a full disk this can take long, VERY long. Start the render, get some coffee, run around the block anf then wait some more, it should actually begin with the render and respond to mouse movements at some stage. As a sugestion for posing multiple figures it is best to begin posing one figure, save it as a character, export it as an object, remove it and import the object. Now begin with posing the other figure, it is a lot of work but it will prevent all crosstalk. After posing a figure always save it as a character, export, remove, import. It will also make all renders faster as the object are a lot smaller in size. There is of course a problem with this as some of the materials setting get corrupted (so the must be checked and corrected). Another one of those bugs in Poser we have to live with for now.