Quote - woahs, my render bucket hasn't moved since last night. 

does raising the ffrender priority in taskmanager do any good?  or will i just totally tank my pc ?

it's not coming out the way i was hoping, anyhoos, i was aiming for art nouveau-ish, Alphonse Mucha.

FFRender should already take all the CPU cores and be used at 100%. Raising the priority will not help (Unless of  course you have other CPU intensive applications running at the same time)