Yep, the hooded cape renders FAST in both draft and production modes with all the default settings. Two or three seconds, tops. hmm, I lied, I also had some M3 boots in the scene. I'll try rendering those by themselves. pause A LOT slower but both rendered. Slower means about 10 seconds. Ok, you have me thinking now. What else...umm, I had hair as well, forgot about that. I'll add M3 and try again. pause M3, hooded cloak, boots (Moto boots in Michael's Morphing clothes) all rendered. Much slower (3 mins?) but it worked. Ok, I'll add the hair (Hair/Daz Hair/ MiHai Hair) and see. pause Oho...it stopped at "Adding Objects". Strange, I've used that hair before though. hmm. I'll add M3 and the MiHai hair to a new scene by themselves and try rendering. pause The MiHai hair apparently is blowing it up. I'll load that original scene, remove the hair and try to render. The scene renders...paused for half a minute or so on Adding Objects but ended up rendering quite rapidly once it got going. So, why is the MiHai hair causing this distressing problem? Is there a workaround? Regrouping the mesh? Hmm, how would I do that? BTW, thank you very much little dragon for helping me to think straight about troubleshooting this.