For some reason, my Firefly render engine on my P7 has been acting unreasonably.  It goes through the motions of rendering, only to present the BG color at the end of it.  Since my default mode is to assume stupidity on my part, can you tell me where I am messing up?

If you have it set to render in an external process, try switching back to the internal renderer (which incidentally is much more robust since SR1).  I believe other folks have had similar problems with firewall ports being blocked and keeping the Poser.exe process from talking to the external renderer.

just allow Poser.exe through your firewall and all will be well.
(poser.exe and FFRender.exe use sockets to transfer data. Zonealarm, Norton etc block sockets as part of their protection which stops Poser from rendering properly)

Khai, I love your adaptation of the Mentat Mantra. Maybe, "that thoughts acquire speed- the teeth acquire a stain- the stain is a warning" Very funny. wolfmanjim, I'm not sure I've seen you're problem but do make sure that you're not outside an object wall. In preview mode an object with only inwardly facing normals might appear transparent but when rendered will block the camera unless you turn off back facing polys in the render settings. This may not be what you're experiencing but that condition can cause results similar to what you're describing.