Quote - Poser didnt run any faster BUT it did allow me to finish a render which I'd previously tried a half dozen times or so with numerous render settings (and failed) including minimal bucket and texture sizes. i did still have to lower the bucket and texture sizes but not to the same extent, and to my relief this time I didnt get an out of memory error.

It's my understanding that texture resizing within Poser can use more RAM than it saves. It's enough of a concern that the Poser 7 adverts mention they've fixed it. So it may help to do a resized texture. Backup the fullsize and save the shrunk version under the original name; then you don't have to worry about missing references in Poser. I also gather that Power converts the texture to an uncompressed format for internal use. So the size of the file doesn't matter much.