I think I know what's happening here. I probably was only really paying attention to Task Manager when I was using the BG render, to see the CPU and RAM usage. So my belief that I've only seen FFRender64.exe running may be flawed due to not paying attention at other times.

I'd check right now but my Poser box is also my Lightwave box and I have LW chugging away on a cloth sim that's probably gonna take a week, being that LW only uses one lousy core for dynamic calculations...