Hey folks.  Nothing new installed and I have even tried starting clean (everything disabled in config) and nothing is helping.  Prior to the issue happening I was able to render and run photoshop at the same time so I can be testing and working at the same time and now... it doesn't matter if anything is up or if Poser is the only thing going.  I've closed out volume panel and literally everything else you can without crashing the system in task manager and it's not making a difference.

I'm using Vex lights which honestly are some of the fastest I know of and even with that it's barely crawling.  Literally until you see it tick in the render status you'd swear poser has crashed.  

My render settings (right now) on firefly has Cast Shadows and Raytracing on.  2 bounces for raytrace.  Min shading is 0. Pixel samples is set to 10.  Max texture 1024.  Bucket size is 32.

Even if I drop the raytrace bounces to 0 there's no difference. 

My pose files are also getting corrupted (as in my model(s) is/are coming up with multi-colored mesh bits where she should be textured and no figure showing in the tab) so I think something is seriously wrong with poser. Smith micro not being much of a help and that's great since my upgrade was a d/l not a disk last time.  

Running out of things to try =/