grichter - Switching to Sreed improves things noticeably, but it's still pretty choppy.

piersyf - I'm not a fan of wireframe at all. I've tried it. I can't see poke throughs, and (more importantly) I can't fix them with the morph brush in wire frame. Maybe that would change with practice, but I'm too busy learning the material room right now. :P  Good suggestion though.

However, changing to wireframe makes the preview Window just fly even with the scene I'm talking about loaded. So it's almost certainly a texture loading issue.

JohnDoe641 - Lowering the texture resoution for the preview window to 128 improves things slightly, and by slightly I mean barely noticeable. :)

ArtBee - At its largest, the save file is only 40 Mb compressed. The current iteration of the scene that I'm working with is 30 MB compressed, and 135 uncompressed. While loading the scene, RAM usage jumps to 4 GB then slowly increases from 4 GB to 6.5 GB and evens back out at about 5 GB. Texture cache has 164 items in it with the scene loaded, totalling 3.06 GB in size. Reloading textures takes forever - render/reload textures.

shvrdavid - Maybe it shouldn't be, but this is my main day to day and gaming system at home. So while an Xeon may render faster, I think the I7 would be a more appropriate choice for this Rig until I can build a dedicated rendering machine (which will be a long, long time). What are your thoughts though?

There is one other thing I've noticed. Because this scene is slow sometimes I'll open a new scene with File - New. I do this to work on morphs or materials, then save the modified object and reload the original scene. I add the modified object back in from my library. This saves me trying to work on it with a super slow preview window. When I do that a couple times though, and try to reload the original scene, then Poser becomes non-responsive and I have to End the Process. I then open Poser again and load the scene, and I'm back to just slow instead of non-responsive.

So this really sounds like a texture loading problem to me.