Gah, unfortunately the problem persists but at least its down to less than 10-20 seconds from render to preview screen.. I wish I could get it back to normal again as I'm doing story lines, which though not overly complex, still gets tedious waiting for the screen to be active again.. 

If I were to 'reinstall' the patch, it shouldn't do any harm, would it? Perhaps something got munged in the initial install of the patch?

I'm also starting to wonder if the problem does lie with the ATI 6950 card as sometimes, when in preview, I end up with a small patch of updated view while the larger part of the preview screen doesn't change at all until I minimize and re-maximize the screen to show the new view? If I do a pic capture or a render, the whole image is saved as it was changed, so it's hard to show you what I'm refering to with this problem.. I'll try a screen capture and see if anyone encountered this before and might be able to shed some light on what I'm experiencing?

 

Cheers