it was working fine all day, and then i somehow broke it. i've tried to turn everything down, restart, clear caches.. No clue what I did to break it.

Also my D3D render firefly window has red text in it now where it used to be green

Irradiance Cache and Irradiance Sample Size used to be green too.

The red Depth Map indicates none of your lights have depth mapped shadows enabled. Green means at least one is using Depth Mapped shadows. It's just an indicator. It means you'll be using that and should enable shadows.

The dialog seems to try to figure out what you need to have enabled. If a light or material or shadow requires ray tracing, then the corresponding indicator is green.

Red on the AO cache parameters means you're not going to need AO so changing these values is pointless. 

 Ok well thats good then.

And I guess i corrupted my scene. I started over completely fresh and she started rendering again. No clue how to undo whatever i did though lol

I get this wierd thing with IDL where it precalc's 80% of a scene fine, then the rest takes FOREVER, and everything is red (you know how it puts red dots in the precalc render, well it looks like I took MS Paint to it and painted red at the bottom)

Also I have this problem where sometimes, if I move a light, object or figure, and re-render a scene (with or without IDL) raytracing just plain old stops working, its like its not ticked (though it is). I have to restart PP2010, then it will render fine again till I move something

Closely spaced samples (red dots) happens when the geometry is curved on a small scale. It's normal for it to become dense if the geometry is highly detailed.

What's the situation at the bottom?

Quote - I get this wierd thing with IDL where it precalc's 80% of a scene fine, then the rest takes FOREVER, and everything is red (you know how it puts red dots in the precalc render, well it looks like I took MS Paint to it and painted red at the bottom)

I have seen this too. Check your Irradiance Sample Size. If that is set very low, the IDL pre-calc samples can be very dense even in areas with little or no geometry variation, and the precalc will take ages to achieve a worse result. The reasons for this are discussed in the huge Poser 8 IDL thread.

 I've had the raytrace bug, but only in P8 and not Ppro2010 yet. Sometimes just re-rendering and always restarting fixed it, but I dont know why it happens. Never found a trigger.

I have to say IDL since its first iteration in P8 has come SO FAR. Before it was ridiculous to try and do IDL with raytracing on transmapped hair - now I can just leave it in and the extra render time is marginal, with amazing results.