Finally got the scene to render, took better part of a day, had to reduce the ray bounces from 6 to only 3 (ok for this scene but lousy if I intended to have any reflections...) and had to lower samples from my usual choice of 25 to only 10.

guess Poser 7 is ok for the Animae makers...but its loosing the race for "fine art" creators, DAZStudio renders the scene in under 20 minutes, and that's WITH a fully clothes David 3 character and his props added and my original light configuration...and only one cpu with just 756meg of ram