Quote - Anti-virus programs are sometimes at fault, turning a snappy computer into crap.

I found that AVG Resident Shield was pigging up any program that I ran that had to look at the disk for any reason, generating thousands of page faults. This wasn't just affecting Poser. My browser was slow, my flight simulator took forever to load a scene, my software development tools acted like it was 1985, etc.

When rendering anything wiht large textures, this was really obviously a problem. Poser likes to convert textures into multiple levels of detail for mip-mapping. These are large, rapidly produced files binary files, but the anti-virus was examining them very slowly and not letting Poser do I/O quickly.

Try disabling any real-time disk sniffing stuff.

That could very well be the problem.  I installed Kasperski around the same time this started...  I'll try that first.