O.k., so for a while I've been living with render times that seemed soooo long to me and I often wondered what I could do to speed things up - without losing much image quality.  So I've wasted my Saturday doing the tedious task of altering render settings one variable at a time, one increment/decrement at a time.  I'm here to share the fruits of my labor with you all, and more importantly get feedback from you all.  Sorry if this ground has been covered before (I'm sure it has), but what the heck.

So to put a few initial parameters out there:

Hardware/OS:
AMD 2.1 G processor
NVidia GeForce 4800 graphics card (Open GL enabled)
1.5 GB memory (pc2700)
MS Windows 2000

Poser 6 SP 2

In the test I used one infinite light and one IBL.  No shadows on the IBL, the shadow map size for the infinite light is set to 8192, shadow blur radius 2.5, minimum bias 0.10000,  (display units in inches).

The model I used in the test image was V3, shooting with the face camera, which always seems to take longer (probably because there's more detail in the face than anywhere else).
I'm using Face Off's Occlusion Master and Unimesh Realism Kit - so the character itself is bearing Ambient Occlusion nodes.  I'm using Robin, a texture by A_ (a beautiful texture in general, but even greater if you're needing a redhead - http://market.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=31022), with a body texture map of size 3000x4000 (approx 1.8 MB), a head texture map of size  4000x2720 (approx 2.1 MB).

I normally have been using render settings I got from Face Off (I forget where/how exactly) which give great results.  So I started with it as a base and adjusted from there, trying to adjust various settings to improve performance.  The settings follow as images, with the resulting renders after that.....