hi,

just adding my dime to the debate. Poser is sensitive indeed to the videodriver, but having an older one usually leads to random-like weird behaviour in the design phase, and in the User Interface arena. 
Since you're in a 32-bit OS environment, it might be worthwhile starting TaskManager (right click your taskbar), look into Processes and check whether the Poser memory usage comes close to 2Gb. If so, you've got to activate the 3Gb-switch in Windows. If not, there is no memory issue. 

Note that each CPU does one thread at a time, each thread addresses one bucket. Having a bucket-size larger than your image just turns the renderer into a one-thread system. Having small buckets generates some overhead due to bucket-overlap-calculations (portions of the scene effecting each other). Life is one big trade off.

The thing that really wonders me if that you only get a portion of the result. I would say: small buckets, multi-thread and render in Poser, so you can see what it's doing. That might you give some clue.

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Usually I'm wrong. But to be effective and efficient, I don't need to be correct or accurate.

visit www.aRtBeeWeb.nl (works) or Missing Manuals (tutorials & reviews) - both need an update though