So then maybe an area render speeds up later in the process?  I did a full standing character render, no props, nothng fancy, just hi res.  Then needed to fix the facial expression, so I did an area render on the face only.

The full render took about 2 hours to complete.

The area render on just the face took an hour and didn't even regester any progress on the progress bar.  I tried a restart and tried again, same results.

Doing a normal render now with the new expression and we seem to be on schedule with 2 hours, so at least it's predictable.