"Just a quick test render at default firefly that would be done in about 30 seconds in P6 chokes and freezes. Reduce it to draft quality....It does it but it chugs..."

Klutz: you might want to try to build the test scene in P7 instead of opening an old P6 scene. I recall having some problems like that when I upgraded to P6 from P4; the errors were actually in some of the figure Cr2s (there was some extra garbage in them that P6 didn't like) and not in the render engine; you might be running into something like that.