The more I think about this, the more I am beginning to think its software, a bottleneck of any sort affecting CPU would (I would think) not leave any available room for running other programs, its kind of like the CPU is intentionally holding back to give available processing to whatever else I'm doing... Which I could understand if the priority was set to normal, but even in real time it holds back, does any one know of any kind of priority setting in poser? I remember DVD shrink had a 'run in low priority' mode that slowed it down substantially, could there be something like this in poser?

Also, I noticed that in the windows task manager there are at any given time 340+ threads(25+ processes), I assume this is normal OS stuff, but if the CPU is giving each priority that could add up to a deficit of 50%..?

Well, on a positive note it is still quite quick running at half speed, finished a render last night that would have taken 17 - 20 hours in the old system (900 frames), took about 11 on this one.. and I could use my PC for any games / internet stuff I wanted without any laboring... so I guess I can live with this.

thanks for all your responses.