I may be a lone Posimator, but this is what I'm doing... I try to stay away from FireFlaw, but if I need to use it I uncheck EVERYTHING i'm not using.

I Usually set the bucket size down to 8 or 16 That seems to speed things up a bit. I turn the shadeing rate up to at least 4. It speeds things up a bit and I can't see the difference.

Here's probably the biggest tip. If your scene has lots of polygons (100,000+) use ray traced shadows and turn off all the lighs' shadows except for the key light and maybe one other. The Shadow mapped shadows take just as long to render ans the main scene. 2 or three shadows and you'll be rendering an hour on one frame.

Lone Posimator