just downloaded Vizard Lite - crashes upon startup...

[tobin]

This is certainly not a problem we're aware of as it would be unacceptable to leave such a bug in release software. My first suspicion, however, is anti-virus software is disrupting Vizard's launch. Have you disabled all anti-virus tools and tested then?

While a ton of changes and improvements have gone into making Vizard R3, nearly all these are in winviz.exe (the render engine) and its support modules. Vizard.exe (our development environment) has not changed substantially since 2.5, so the fact the Vizard.exe bombs out indicates that there is something fundamentally special about your laptop at the OS level to me (e.g., anti-virus).