Raytrace bounces "too high" means different things for different purposes.  For behavior that's closer to the real world, 7 or 8 bounces is better.  1 bounce is OK for preview and testing, but it's literally light hitting a surface, bouncing once, and then being completely absorbed by whatever it hits next.  This might be the appearance you want and it certainly renders faster, but it is less realistic.

You also want to turn down the Diffuse_Value of all surfaces in the scene to 0.8 (lower for specific materials that you want to have less diffuse value), so that the amount of light bounced is gradually tapered off as it would be in the real world.  I have a script that does this for all surfaces in a scene, but be aware it is ALL SURFACES IN THE SCENE - if you have some material that needs to have a different diffuse value you'd need to set that manually after running the script.
http://sites.google.com/site/fleshforge2/Home/free-stuff/set-diffuse_value-to-0-8-script
http://cid-b233dcaeefa9709c.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Poser%20Freebies/Diffuse%5E_Value%20Script/Diffuse%5E_Value%20Script.zip

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