An increased VM will slow your system down if you do not have enough space on the drive to which it is placed and if you place it on the same physical drive as the system files. Windows does indedd handle VM incredibly well. In independent tests, it sorta kicked butt over competitive systems. However, At rendertime, Poser is not a patient application -- it will not wait for windows to adjust VM, and will lock. For this reason, and most particularly, it is recommended (including by MS) that you increase your VM/swapfile size to the maximum allowable for the number of applications in use -- as any 32 bit OS has the single limitation of being able to assign a maximum of 2GB to any single application event. In general, if you run Poser, windows itself, and, say, windows media player all at once and you plan to render, a good setting is roughly 3096.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)