I recently read a post that stated the Dissplacement area of the Poser Surface Node was useless unless you had "Use Dissplacement Maps" checked, and "Dissplacement Bounds" set to 1, in Render Settings. I thought this was super to know so I turned them on and then tested an eyebrow trans I'm using by plugging it into the Dissplacemnt node. I then started an area render, at near Draft, but had to cancell it after I saw no progress within the first 20 minutes it rendered? Without those setting active the render then took 1-2 minutes?

Yeah 20 minutes seems something was wrong. Try decreasing bucket size and uncheck Texture filtering. See if that speeds it up. Uncheck Raytracing too. But yes displacement takes longer, not that long though.

I use displacement a lot and haven't noticed much longer renders

"Longer" is a relative thing, of course. If you have a very fast machine, you might not notice the increase for a simple displacement problem. But displacement involves temporarily complicating the mesh, so every calculation should increase in length. I think setting the Displacement Bounds to 1 is excessive, but I don't think high bounds increase render time. Stewer has an excellent FAQ on rendering that gives the recommended setting as 2x the largest Displacement value you have set. In other words, for the default displacement of 0.08... you would use a Bounds of less than 0.20. His discussion of displacement is the classic on the subject, by the way. His explanation of the need to offset your displacement is the key to using it effectively. M

I've spent some time playing with different Displacement Bounds and Maps and I've found that it's a resounding YES, they do make your render time longer, sometimes much longer.

Well, Poser 6 tries to automatically set the displacement bounds correctly, so unless you see obvious holes in the geometry at bucket edges, you don't have to worry about setting the bounds yourself. Other than that, in ordinary situations (like simple texture-driven displacement of an object in the center of your scene) will only barely impact your scene. Things will take longer if you have complex procedurals in your displacement shader, extremely large displacements or displacement in very very close-up situations. Displacing geometry over several buckets is more expensive than displacing things within one bucket, both memory- and calculationwise.