I really like this hair prop, but when combined with other props and textures it wrecks havoc on my system.

If I take the figure & spawn a prop from it, maybe that will reduce the drain on my system ?

Given the amount of info that you have supplied, I am guessing that the hair prop is huge ( large number of polys ).  Spawning a prop should not change that.

If you run it thru Poser Game Dev, is the product small enough and still useful?

spawning a prop may not help if the problem is poly count, but it might if the problem is morphs.

Sometimes (not all the time) it's not the prop itself but how many lights are in your scene. Someone recently ran into the same problem (different hair and items in scene though) and it the culprit was too many lights. The system was overworked trying to calculate all the shadows and etc.

It's just a suggestion to think about.

Also what version of Poser are you using, what type of computer system do you have? Any details may help us figure out a solution.

There are many variables which can contribute to render crashes.  As mentioned, too many lights is one factor; they are resource hogs as mentioned in the manual.  High resolution textures is another issue; unless the scene requires extreme closeups, maps should be down-sized for average renders.  Outrageous displacement values and maps can cripple renders.  Also add transparency maps to the mix.  Take you pick.  And lets not forget render settings; pushing extreme quality values will impact time and stability.

What is the poly count on the hair prop?

Do you have any hair props with similar poly counts that do not cause problems?

If you have hair props of similar poly counts that do not cause the out of memory issue then it's not the poly count.

Once you rule that out, you will need to investigate some of the other possiblities.

Back in the P5 days, Neftis Mihai hair caused issues with it's high poly count.  You might be able to locate the tutorial in the DAZ tutorial archives on how to fix it.  Basically you took the hair prop and broke it down using the grouping tool.  Rather than it being one high poly prop, it became about six (skullcap and 5 groups) smaller, lower poly props grouped together.  The overall polycount was the same but breaking it up fixed the problem.

To find the tutorial go the oldartzonewiki in the DAZ wiki.  Look for a tutorial called "How to make Mihai Hair work in Firefly".  There are no pics available with it but the instructions will walk you through. 

all of them ( up there) but first turn off all the windoze fancy's, them little things telling you the time whateva are eatting ram, close down all other proggys before rendering and dive into startup (ccleaner is good but tis others) remove anything you dont NEED and disable anything your not sure about :-(    , is amazing how much junk that can get in there

of course if the scene is still too heavy could render in parts  and assemble in ps(other)