Just wondering how Vegas responds to systems with multiple cores/processores. Is the program set up to handle these types of systems for faster rendering?

Lots of posts on this, if you care to search, but the short answer is "yes".

I'll vouch for Seth's "yes".
A 10 min. project that I did last summer took 3 hr. to render (lots of chroma key and other FX) on a P4 3.4GHz machine.
My new quad core did it in 27 min. :-)