Naw, my desktop in an q9550, 8gb of ram, a 1tb 7200rpm HDD, and an Nvidia 470 which can push 5 million polys before it gets to slow. An SSD will not solve the OPs problem, a real OS would.
http://www.unearthlychallenge.com/2009/challenge/en_rules.php He's launched it, but I believe a couple pages are still being ironed out, mostly the Join pages. He'll have them solved over the weekend. GET TO MAKIN THE SEXY.
Distribution of wealth, education, health care.. could solve allot of problems... I would like to see a day when men and women of all creed and color are the same. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Your specs are well above the ideal specs for SD, you should be fine. I would indeed recommend sending us an email so we can upgrade you to 5.0 and see if it solves the performance issue.
http://arongranberg.com/astar/features should solve all your trouble if you want grid. and https://code.google.com/p/recastnavigation/ if you really want to make meshes automatically before game is running. hope this helps
Blender doesn't support hard edge export in any way, it hasn't been solved yet. http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?291881-Exporting-OBJ-and-FBX-physically-break-edges-no-love-for-the-game-making-community
Hrmpf. I just had Viewport Canvas fail on me, trying to paint on a sphere with flipped normals. To edit a cubemap, basically. VC flips out, paints erratically. Oh well. Glad you (kinda) solved it.
there is a 4r4 patch 2 that you can update to using the auto updater. it solves a few small bugs, lightbox disabling being one of them http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?170337-ZBrush-4R4-Update-2-is-Ready
setting up dota hatery as service provider would indeed solve the whole problem in a very fair way. from what i heard of people who are service providers already, they can good live from it.
If you embed your images, it makes things a lot easier for people to solve your problem. Just right-click an image and copy the full url, including the extension (.png or .jpg) then use the Attach Image button.