Well I'm happy to report that after 4 full days or working with poser 2012 (i7 940, 12G mem and AMD 4950 2G) that the delays between the render and preview screens seem to have been resolved.. (knock on wood).. 

I think the trick behind it is to load poser first before anything else (browsers, PS, Dreamweaver etc) and everything seems to be fine..  With hardware shaders enabled, I am able to go from the rendered screen back to the preview screen and resume posing without any delays what so ever.. now THAT's what I was looking for.. nice! Able to pose to pose the models and see right away before rendering what the lighting is going to look like on their bodies and allows me to make adjustments before sending it to render.. 

Even if I only plan to use Poser later in the day (I boot up every morning), I minimize the poser screen and do my other work, then later I max the poser environment and everything works fine.. with the system I have, having poser sitting in the background doesn't affect any of the other work I'm doing (except beckoning me to do some more poser work ;)

I still get the occassional picture in picture glitch when going back to preview screen and that can take 10 seconds to clear but if I keep a full screen browser window or image view window minimized, all I have to do is maximize it to cover the poser screen and then minimize it again, it clears the issue right away..  not the fanciest fix but it works with just two clicks... 

If you have that delay glitch, give this a try and see if it works for you as well.. hopefully it does..