hi Bim,

I know where you're coming from, my animations are music based and last about 4 mins each, that's 7000 frames or so. In the early days of 1 CPU per machine (5 years back or so), I managed a stack of 4 controlled by Windows RemoteDesktop. It required a serious network design and systems management, all data had to be on the same drive letter for all machines, and so on.
You can still experience the results on the net, check my site (www.artbeeweb.nl), go 'My Olde Site" from the collection at the bottom, and search the gallery for the Mirror in Mirror short. Full of reflections and refractions, the longest rendering was 20 hours on a single frame and the whole thing took a month continuous rendering (on 4 machines in parallel).

Nowadays, I don't do that anymore. All 4 cores are in one machine (Q6600 based, next one will have six based on i980). I always render out image sequences so I can pick up easily after a crash or power fail or what (auto restarts at night thanks to MS Update, great). But most important, I design my animations in separate shots of 2 to 6 sec. Like TV commercials, which last 30 sec only and contain 5 to 10 shots each, modern takes never ever are long haules anymore. I even advocate that slide shows  should have 2 sec max per shot, instead of the default settings like 5 or more.

Then, I put up a Poser file for each take, or small group of takes. After finishing one in design (a one-thread process mostly, except for test renders) I take it into rendering at the background at Low Prio, while designing the next in front. Ideally, I can design 8 to 12 hours a day while the machine rattles 24 hours a day at full 100% 4 CPU load. 
Practically, I render out stills for the keyframes first, and make a slideshow on the music from them. This helps me to direct the animation as a whole, as some storyboarding. If OK I render out to image sequences, and generate a (lower quality) avi or so from them. This helps me in post processing too.

I consider a second machine some times, but it's not worth the money. You not only buy extra CPU but memory, disk, casing etc too, and you run into various systems management issues constantly. In the meantime, the 'design machine" runs about empty. Seen it, been there, done it. But I do hope that Poser is going to support CUDA-based rendering by the nVidia cards. This enables us to expand on graphix processors only (see www.cubixgpu.com for instance).

I hope this helps a bit.

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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