Please ignore that last message – trouble in automated CIS land.
Well, anyway, the long and the short of it is that I went back into
my Vibrant setup and reset the Viper driver to 65000 colors, rather
than 256. And weird as can be, rendering time went DOWN, about 30
seconds, plus the screen redraw was instantanious. Very weird…
Thanks for the help and setting me thinking in the right way.