Quote - > Quote - > Quote - Every time? No matter what the content or settings? ...

Yes every time. I tried different settings. When I render the poser screen is black with tiny red dots. I'm assuming that when poser calculates the IDL. Depending on the scene it takes cca 30 minutes but when it actually starts the real render FFrender stops working.

No matter the content? You didn't answer that part.

I'm trying to get at the boundaries of the problem. Does it even lock up with just a couple primitives and a ground plane? If so, we go in one direction. If not we go in another.

Obviously there's something wrong with Poser if you can't render a sphere and a box with IDL. But if you can, then we need to understand the nature of the scene contents. For example, if you're using RDNA's Terradome with the big transparency sheets for atmospheric effects, this will appear to hang, but it is actually just incredibly complicated to render and could take hours before you see even one bucket show up.

In the absence of any data, I can't figure out what to suggest as the next step.

Sorry for the late reply, I was away for the weekend.
Seems that it was either Vista or driver problem because now that I installed windows7 poser8 works fine. 
I have just one more question. If I render my scene with IDL on should I see the black screen with the tiny red dots (calculating) before the actual render?  Because I dont see it. The renders turn out good, far better than what I'm used to in poser pro, but I'm not sure IDL is working.