I've been watching this forum since the release of P5 trying to find some pattern as to people having problems and those who are not. No luck. It was driving me nuts 'til a friend told me it's the protection system you used. He said that system is known throughout the industry as causing the most problems for users but he couldn't shed any light on why some people seem to be problem-free. He also said my troubles would probably lessen--if not stop--if I used a 'crack,' which I will not do. Now the patch is out and it seems to be the same thing: some are having major trouble and some aren't. Some who didn't have trouble before have it now, so maybe my friend is correct. One user in a recent thread said that even his Avatar Lab started acting up after applying the P5 patch. Doesn't Avatar Lab use the same protection scheme? So I guess my questions are, 1. Is my friend correct about the protection you used? 2. Could the protection be the culprit with the major problems such as program freezes and the BSOD? 3. Did you do something to the scheme in the patches? If so, what was it and why? 4. Is it true that people who use a 'crack' won't have a lot of these problems? 5. Is there going to be another full patch? I won't run the patch as is because of the trouble people are reporting. Right now P5 at least loads for me, even though I can't use the face room. Thanks in advance.

I'm going of stuff I've read online, (mostly from hackers and crackers, and not a few annoyed end users) so this may not be that current. But One of the things i found most interesting was the fact that Intelok posesses the ability to reset your machine, which it does by monkeying with the keyboard, apparently because there is no other way of forcing a reset, except by faking the keypress. Which I thought was a fairly cool hack, technically. But the more you dig the more you seem to find that it really doesn't play nice with others. If anyone's interested, I've actually got the Interlok dev guide on CD somewhere, (got it from Pace before they resticted access to the documentation) I could make it available for those that want a better understaing of what it's doing. later jb

I reported about a freezing problem after applying the SR1 patch. Now I replaced the TPkd.sys file 4.1.1.1074 version with the 3.0.7.840 in my main WinK2 partition and, oh wonder, Poser5 and AvatarLab are running again. TPkd.sys is an Interlok system file Anti-Piracy from PACE. Both Poser5 and Avatarlab use the same registration procedure and in my case it's evident that the freezing problem was caused by the protection mecanism.

So Poser5 doesn't work with avatar lab unless you muck about with Interlok? Now call me a critic, but one would have assumed that CL would test at least thier own apps to make sure they'd play nice together. I can understand that they can't test everything, but that strikes me as a fairly fundemental test failure. I used to work for AT&T Labs (the only bit of labs outside of the US, now closed) there were about 30 people at the whole site, but 6 of them were the test team. We rolled our own code for the comms industry, so ever the smallest tweak was fully regression tested, etc. There were far more machines in the test clusters, than there were on people's desks. So, what say you CL? Care to comment? later jb

Whenever I talk to the guys at work about cracking stuff they claim it all runs better. Games. 3D software. 2D software. OS's. It would really be a shame if you had to crack your own software that youve put up money for just to make it run better. I have Lightwave. I belive that it would start up faster if it didnt have to go through the dongle to hookup but that is only a slight delay and seems to be the only small prob with having a security system like that. As for testing. I think they limited testing to keep cracked poser5 software off the filesharing markets. Lightwave did extensive testing and there where tons of cracks for LW7.0 and 7.5 even before it got to consumers computers. In fact I saw 7.5 3 days before it was released and I payed for LW and I was like "What the frick???.

You need the softwear company to give you another release code for their softwear to reinstall on every hard drive change you go through. This can limit your upgrade choices on your own hardwear upgrade path. Is that aceptable? What if you have to do this one time to many? What is an acceptable number of times and in what period(After the first three). Ugggg! This is what it means to be "hardwear locked."

Attached Link: http://www.paceap.com/docs/

Well, I've been through my entire CD collection, only to find that the pdf's must be on the CD I gave to somebody last week because it had a driver on it. Bugger! Luckily I remembered how I found it the first time :) Check the link. later jb

Thanks for the link. I'll go through 'em tomorrow and post anything I find relevant. Also, it appears CL is not going to comment at this time. I'll wait 'til Monday and ask again.

I wont touch p5 until the protection system is gone. I upgrade constantly and have 3 desktops spread around my house (bedroom, basement, living room) + laptop that I would normally like to install on... I only use 1 machine at a time naturally. I just like to be able to work whenever/wherever the inspiration hits.. Protection systems always penalize the legit user as the hackers have patches to get around things in seconds... Amazing adobe after affects production bundle a $1,800.00 program trusts their users with a key they type in. In addition it appears at the moment that poser 5 is a version .8 product, should be interesting to see how often patches will be released to address various issues. d

The people who don't want to pay for the software (crackers) and spend a fair amount of time removing protection (crackers) and see it as a political statement (some crackers)... these people tell you that software is better after a crack. And you think this is objective? I would be really surprise if as a general case sofwtare stability was enhanced by some 16 year old Jolt cola fiend mucking about in it with his stolen copy of "Soft Ice" ripping out chunks of code he only barely understands. Does that sound like something that would HELP to you?

Well, considering the state of the initial release, the subsequent patch, the patch for the patch, and the problems people are still having; would it not be an embarrasment to CLs' programmers if a "16 year old Jolt cola fiend mucking about in it with his stolen copy of 'Soft Ice' ripping out chunks of code he only barely understands" actually did make P5 run more stable? :O)

Well it would be, but I doubt it will happen. Besides, I am fairly careful about what I put on my machine, and inserting code from someone who is already demonstrating a willingness to violate other peoples rights (a cracker ) into a tool I am entrusting things I care about too seems like a recipie for disaster :)