Hi scifiguy !

it's a nice first image ! here are a few answers to your questions :

EDITING TEXTURE ON POSER IMPORT :

you cannot access all the POSER textures from the world browser. To see all the material on the model open the "MATERIAL SUMMARY" (see pic above). There you can browse through all the materials in your scene. Double click on each material to open the material editor.

ANTI-ALIAS SETTINGS :

I use "broadcast" quality rendering. It's faster than ULTRA and it produce very good results. To reduce the rendering time even furter use the "USER SETTINGS" :
a standard anti aliasing (12 subrays / quality 70%) is good enough. You can also turn "super-sampling" off if it's not necessary (I always turn it off !).

Some advanced features (depth of field, volumetric light) are extremely slow to render. Think about it before using them...

For the first scenes I did with VUE I had rendering times of 10 hours or more for 800X600 pixels images ! Now I'm more careful and I always get rendering time of 1 hour or less.

CRIPPLING SLOW RESPONSE :

after each action (editing a material, moving an object, etc...) VUE systematicaly re-draw the preview in the camera control center. This is a CPU intensive task. You can disable it if you need a faster reponse : Right-click on the camera preview an disable AUTO-UPDATE. Now each time you need an updated preview just click on it. Without the auto-update VUE will not "freeze" during material editing.

If you think that VUE is too slow, choose "wireframe" preview on some of the 3Dview, and use "flat shaded" instead of "smooth shaded" for the main camera view.

Don't forget to put the objects in different layers. Hide the one your are not currently working on (In your image for example, you can put the main character, the city and the background mountains in different layers).

MULTI-TASKING :

you should let VUE do its job ! have a drink, go to bed, go outside...

YOUR SPEC :

your PC is a powerfull machine, it can handle more than 40 millions polygons and scene of a 100 MB.

Hope this will help !

:) Eric