  When molecules interact with intense light sources of femtosecond or shorter
duration the rotational degrees of freedom are frozen during the response to
the strong nonperturbative interaction. We show how the frozen degrees of
freedom affect the measurable signals in high-harmonic generation and above
threshold ionization. High-harmonic generation exhibits optical coherence in
the signal from different orientations of the molecule. For ionization, the
contributions from different orientations are added incoherently. The effects
are demonstrated for realistic alignment and orientation schemes.
