Here's a couple of tips to speed up long renders in Bryce 5. I'm currently doing animations with lots of metaballs and those renders are taking overnight. One thing that will speed up thing is of course taking away zonealarm etc. Just remember to unplug the DSL whatever connection. Another thing that appears to have 5-10% effect is shutting down whatever "sleep", screensavers etc.. And I don't mean just making them disabled: uninstall the process from windows alltogether. That way Windows won't be polling the program. You may have to go into BIOS settings to uncheck the powesavers there. That'l give a few clicks for the processor to render and not poll BIOS. They do affect overall. When done that shut down the monitor to prevent overburn.

I think any service or app that is running will require cpu attention from time to time. Some more than others. This is a good tip because sometimes we don't think about this when rendering.

Right on, joke... I'm curious, though, how much Processor power it actually takes to poll such screen/power saving functions, and I'm wondering if it's a difference of seconds or minutes? I suppose a few seconds per frame adds up when dealing with animations, I'm just curious if you everbenchmarked the difference? Let me know, I have a bunch of machines at home running Lightning and anything to save time kicks ass...