oooo. mysteriously ambiguous.  i guess i can always hope.

here's a question you can answer: have you done anything at larger scales?  like, scaled your scene up 10 or 100 times?  iirc, Poser's small scale makes problems even in Firefly (or any biased renderer).  there was someone once in the eye industry (optometrist?) at RDNA who wanted to make a physically accurate eye.  they never did get refraction to work properly (P5, i think), but scaling helped.  i was wondering if things like your light-based AO issues and such might work better.