Thanks for the wire. I don't see anything in that, that would cause a problem. So your current thinking on how to make it better should work.

Warning, I have not tested PFX and nurbs strips side buy side for render time.

I know you would like to try a better way. for the render time.
Unfortunately Hair is a very render intensive. With PFX its slow.. with geometry for each strand its even slower.. I don't know what the render times are on the rurbs stripses, with transparency map. But I can imagine they are much lower.. test it first though..

If you would like to try the patches way on the hair its pretty simple but tedious. You can use nurbs or polys.. although many stick to nurbs if there going to be doing animation. They link the CV's to particle affects to control the movements.. BUT basically the idea is to make a good number of strips out of rurbs. place them around your head. Sort of like really broad, flat hair.. or paper hair. Thin you texture them with strands of hair on the color channel, and add a mask on the transparency channel so that you only see the hair textures and not any background from the geo of the nurbs strip.

Its more work really than PFX, but it would seem to me that it renders faster.. Keep the nurbs tessellation as low as you can get it and have a good look. And it dose look better most of the time.. it looks better because PFX and fur do not respond to light worth a dime. The texture on the nurbs strips is as responsive as the rest of your model to rendering tech.

remember though special angles where you see the bald spots on your model currently. well with out careful placement there are angles you could get to where you don't see the hair strips very well either.. if your looking at the strips from the side of the strip, you will not see the hair.

Hope I'm not blabbering away uselessly hear..