ok decided to actually do a render. first in a VERY long time.
nothing exteme. a v4 naked, a hair, decent light with OA. nothing out of the ordinary for me.
went through all the normal steps, did the bazillion test renders. was happy and went for my normal render settings.
remove backfacing polygones, smooth,raytrace bounce-2, rthe settings are nothing extreme just very "average" settings. I have 2gig of mem. nothing draining my system, windows vista home, poser 6 with all the updates, even reduced the texture map size....
and for some ungodly reason it is taking HOURS to render at my normal size(3000x3000 at 300dpi)
it use to zip through. I had no issue doing them at that size at all. even with scenery in it. but for some reason it is taking AGES and wont render at all at 300dpi.
the only thing I can think of is that I just updated my ATI and that may be it but...I do not know. I would figure that would help it.
I also did a defrag last night. so I do not think that is it.(didnt use the windows defrag used  auslogics defrag)
O.o
any suggestions?

I ignore the DPI and just set pixel size . I usually restart Poser before doing a final render to get back the maximum memory.

If you are using AO set in your light, it needs a lot of ressources with big images. If you switch AO off and your Poser will be faster, try to use material based AO.

Unchecking "visible in RayTrace" from the properties pallette to the hair is an option. If you need a shadow, you can clone a light set to shadowmap and kill the light and just use the shadow... gotta wait for a shadowmap to render, though... Probably faster than a RayTrace pass over transparency maps.