I have a simple scene, 3 regular terrains, 6 trees,  a few vines, 2 patchs of grass, and a V3 and Daz troll. I can not change the atmosphere, it is slowing my 3 ghz with 2 gbs ram to a crawl, while not even doing anything. Any ideas how to get it functioning at a decent speed again. I cant use menus, render, or anything else.

You could try lowering the display-quality settings, condensing some of the materials, hiding layers, temporarily turning off global-illumination or radiosity, and updating Vue to the latest build.

its fully updated, and the problem is I want to turn ON GI, so I can render my scene. I will try condensing to see if that helps thanks

One more thing that I've done in the past to speed things up is to turn-off the synchronized option on texture maps.

You could try turning on GI only at the last moment. What may be happening is that Vue is trying to GI-render your auto-preview and this is slowing things down.

6 terrains and 2 figures is anything but a simple scene. What's the poly count at the bottom right of the interface?

What is slow? openGL display, or rendering? And what version of Vue are you using?

If it's the openGL, lower the display settings, under the preferences menu, even go for wireframe. If you use Infinite, you can use wireframe for orthographic views, and keep openGL for perspective view.

If it's rendering, what are your render settings? Often, GI quality can be set to -1 without quality loss.

1,5 million polys.

I had to set it to wireframe to get it to do anything. There should be a happy medium yes? Between wireframe not being able to see what is going on and full display slideshow.

1,5 million polys.

I had to set it to wireframe to get it to do anything. There should be a happy medium yes? Between wireframe not being able to see what is going on and full display slideshow.

How big are the textures on the Poser figures? Those can be real memory hogs, and vue of any flavor can choke on the 4096x4096x32 body maps and 3000x3000x32 facial maps that many figures use(plus the equivalent sized bump maps). Unless you are doing portraits, that dense a texture map is an utter waste; you simply don't see much of the detail...

This is something I'm learning. The current project I'm working is going really smoothly, and I'm not having to save the scene every 12 actions. I checked the Poser textures and they are all less than 2000 pixels. This may be around the critical value.