It was Norton, all right. It was detecting the port ping of the Rendercows as one of the known, timed trojans, and locking the port access for 30 minutes at a try. Nice feature... : Network rendering is -good-. Just did a test on a slapped together scene; animated sky and water, with the Poser eagle (morphed into a redtailed hawk) doing a little fly around. 16 seconds at 640x480, in final mode, standard AA, using the top of the stack codec for .avi. All of 7hrs, 13min. Now if only the fixed 4.12 will get rid of the transmap flickering....