Aha! Excellent suggestions - thank you so much! I had to uncheck the "separate processes" box and bump the number of threads up to 4, which was stated. That cut the time down by about half...at least on this particular render. Out of curiosity; on a PC running XP, is there a similar issue, or can it take full advantage of the multi-threading?

I also switched out the hair and replaced it with Gwenith Hair from RDNA, which cut it down by another couple of minutes. So now my render time is less than one minute per frame.

So thank you! This was a big help. :-D