Have you always had it set to render to a file? If so try changing the setting to "New Window".

What are your advanced tab settings?

Is this with all scenes or only a specific one? Maybe you have something complicated to calculate at that point and the computer simply needs lot of time to render the area.

I'm gonna go with jroulin on this one ... Aside from your system MAYBE being a little light on horsepower, those settings should be just fine ... one thing I would look at that always sends my machine into a tough render situation, is open reflection maps. See if any surfaces you have in the image have reflections on with no maps, which will force it to render first the item reflected with proper shadowing, and then map that reflection to the surface of the selected item. Just a thought ... hope it helps ...

Art, how would I look for reflection maps? I just bought The gathering structure from DAZ, thats what i was trying to render. maybe that was it.....im still a rookie at this :D

Well, if you select your surfaces pane, then select an individual surface, you will see that you can scroll down the selections to see the "Reflections" tab. If this is an out of the box item, though, I would doubt that would be at issue. Does it occur ONLY with this file, or does it occur with others as well?

Try lowering the Bucket Size setting in the Advanced tab, that tells the renderer to work on smaller chunks which may help if it's a memory issue.