I'm running a 3.2GHz Phenom II X6 with 8GB Crucial DDR3 on an Asus M4A87TD.  Now I have XP pro 64bit on an old Seagate drive, but I bought a new 64GB Crucial SSD and installed poser pro 2010 on there, pointed the temp folder to there as well...I expected my old HD to be the bottleneck but now running an SSD and its still as slow (not using all the cores fully).. I attach a pic of CPU usage while running render. 

have tried.. bucket sizes 64, 128, 256 with no real difference, un-ticking separate processes seemed to speed it up a very little.  tried 3, 6, 12 threads with no real difference. max cached renders up to 12 with no difference and paging has always been turned off.

my question, is anyone having the same issue? is anyone getting better CPU usage? anyone think of something I might have overlooked?

very sincere thanks for all who have read this far, hope someone can point me in the right direction :)

I have no advice, since you claimed to already have manipulated the preference value for number of threads in rendering. (You didn't say that exactly, but you implied it.)

I have I7 860, 4 cores, with hyperthreading. I have threads set to 8. My CPU monitor shows all 8 running 100%.

I do not see the picture you are showing until I run out of ram. Check and see if you are running 100% until you go to the page file. Up until I run out of ram I am at 100%, 6 cores. I am running 12 thread in Poser Pro 2012.

What does the scene that you're rendering look like? Any textures with filtering set to None by any chance? In that case, setting texture filtering to any of the other options should give you a better CPU utilization. Also, don't be to excessive with bucket size, you may just end up exhausting physical RAM. 32 should work just fine.

ToxicWolf - added a screen cap of memory usage while rendering, the total ram used  seems low to me... generally doesn't change much with bucket sizes.

bagginsbill - tried it at 3, 6, and 12 threads with not difference, although selecting separate threads seems to slow it slightly..

hhhhhmmmm ... going to have to think about this. You are getting very low performance.  Multiply your number of cores by 2 and then set the number of threads in render to that number. This has always worked for me.

I had a single page render yesterday that took up a total of 31 gig of memory.  The render ran at 100%, 6 cores until the memory usage went over my ram size (24 gig). Then it went up and down a little, but nothing like what is happening to you.

ToxicWolf - I've tried it on 12 threads (its a 6 core cpu) .. made no noticeable difference.  If its a memory issue I don't under stand it, the commit charge shows my peak is 2/8th of available...

seems to be just before completing each frame the cpu maxed out for just a second or two.. then back to erratic.

Just to make sure, I pulled up the same pz3 file I used for the complex image befor (talked about it above) in pp2010 and rendered part of it with the same results I got with pp2012.

I am at a loss.

update;

tried just rendering a still image, the CPU usage fluctuates until the time the status actually says rendering then it maxed out for a period while the ram went up to 4 gb then slightly fluctuated when the ram maxed... this is more like what I was looking for, so..

not using full CPU while setting up a render (going through lights and shaders etc) - but using full CPU when doing the actual render...

making an avi doesn't seem to max out my memory at all (probably because the render bit of each frame is only rendering a small image for the clip).

Nice ... that is what the picture I put above shows.  The first part of the graph is the loading process and it jumps up when it starts to render.