Hey, thanks DG. I think I'm just gona play around a bit and see if I can't come up with some good render settings. I went a little overboard on the last image I tried. Forgot I read through the RDNA forum, and played around with the precedural skins with the figures. to top it off, I did have the texture filter checked. Doh~!
So, the image was attempting to render @ 3300 x 2500 x 300dpi with a pixel precision of 6, a bucket size of 24, raytracing on, displacement maps on (and in use)... Looking back on it, I can't believe I thought it might render.

As far as other settings, the VM is about as optimized as it's going to get (win2k, manually set VM | 512 start, 3 gig max). There's also a gig of Ram in this machine, so I'm not worried about memory...

Thanks again for the tips!

~DM