Quote - I also tried it on the "fast" setting, but it either takes much longer, or it's freezing up at some point. So that doesn't work either.

Do you have the latest service release for Poser 7? It fixes, amongst other things a potential freeze with the "fast" texture filtering option. With the lastest service release you may also see faster raytraced rendering compared to the earlier version. And despite what many here seem to think, having texture filtering in Poser 7 turned on is in most cases faster than having it turned off.

You may want to try pulling the "irradiance cache" slider to the left and see how it turns out. It might reduce the image quality, but can also give you faster renders.