Sorry to be vague on this report but there is a big difference between camera preview (numpad 0, and the moving the camera in another view or by hitting shift-F) and regular preview (MMB rotation for example). I have also gotten RPR 1.7 to crash a lot when hitting shift-F for enabling the first person positioning. Sometimes it gives the ERROR message other times it crashes and somtimes it works as expected...
At least this is an area to look into for finding bugs.
