Is Poser 6 fixed?

July 10, 2006 8:15 PM

Does Poser 6 for WinXP require administrator privilege to run?

For a number of historical reasons mostly having to do with the fact that the original version of "Poser" was written for "MacOS Classic" and as a result doesn't have a modern internal control architecture (e.g. it doesn't use OS-level threading) when they finally decided to port it to Windows they decided to implement a monumental hack.

Poser up through version 5 loads a driver, which they use to bypass the HAL and the standard OS level and make deep system calls. As a result, you must be an administrator to run Poser up through version 5, because otherwise loading a driver to access the OS that way is a privilege violation.

Now Poser 6 is out. I'm thinking about buying it, but I'm fed up with having Poser deepsix XP. (In fact, I can't run Poser 5 at all on my laptop; it bluescreens the system during program initialization.) What I want to know is if they finally, finally upgraded their basic program architecture so that they don't need to make deep calls to the OS.

If you must be an administrator to run it, then they didn't. If you don't need to be, then they finally fixed it.

Do you need to be an administrator under WinXP in order to run Poser 6?

posted by Steven C. Den Beste to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Well, I have Poser 6 installed on my system, and I just logged out of Administrator and into Guest, and it is currently running in the background. Doesn't appear to be affected at all.
posted by Hildago at 8:58 PM on July 10, 2006

Thank you.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:56 PM on July 10, 2006

Hildago: Can you actually use Poser under guest? Switching users doesn't terminate programs and many programs requiring admin access would be running in the background if you switched to the guest user.
posted by null terminated at 11:29 PM on July 10, 2006

Yeah, I should clarify:

I did not have poser runner under administrator (just firefox and a couple other random programs).

I went to the "switch users" menu, clicked "guest", and started up Poser. When Poser loaded, I messed around with it for about 20 seconds just to see that it didn't lock up immediately, then I posted my comment in this thread.
posted by Hildago at 5:31 PM on July 11, 2006