Oh I see I should have been more clear. Maybe this animation has to do with the FACSHuman plugin I installed..
Every time I try to modify the expression it says it's "Baking animation" for 250 frames which takes a while.
I tried setting all the animation related settings to just 1 frame to try to mitigate it, but it doesn't help.
Maybe it's just because of this plugin and not makehuman itself.
Here, for example, I am trying to do a little character of John Oliver and you can see the progress bar at the bottom.
Not sure why the hair is not rendering correctly, but that's a separate issue. (the hair is mhair02 which I recently downloaded but maybe didn't install correctly)