Follow up:

I took Bantha's advice about turning the hardware shaders off in the render settings but though I didn't like the preview look, at least it worked better than it did before.. but something went awry and Poser wouldn't render anymore.. huh? click Render and nothing happens. So I loaded a previous preset (final quality, raytracing on etc) and boom.. the software ran so fast and smooth for the last 3 hours I couldn't believe it.. wow, now that was fun.. almost as if turning off the hardware shaders and turning them back on kicked the fault in the pants and got things running properly again.. (but honestly don't know what was wrong or if it will come back again, time will tell when I get back to work on it tomorrow)

Gotta like it.. with Poser 2012 running and rendering, I had yahoo voice chat on as I'm working on a project with a friend from across the continent, then photoshopping some of the images, building them into Dreamweaver for the web page project and then ftp them up to the server for testing.. and Poser didn't lag, hesitate or falter.

Colour me impressed.

thank you all for your comments. Much appreciated!