well, I quit all other programs while I was rendering.

There are 15,991 polys in the scene, but far more subdiv elements of which I must confess I don't know how to locate a count of the faces.

I suppose I could go back and convert them all to polys, but it just seems to me there are just too much in my scene for my 2GB RAM

There are two lights: a spot and a point light.