in case anybody asks, poser 4 won't run on current OS X (sno-lep).  didn't read all the above, but just turn off ray-tracing, no smoothing, no displacement, no IDL, no ray-traced lites, no true reflection, no refraction, use shadow-mapped lites and shado-cams, no advanced material room, et al., to get poser4-style render.  should speed things up quite a bit.