bluetone: funny you mention new baby, ours just went to sleep so I get a bit of computer time. I notice something that was bothering the heck out of me. If I leave the Ground Hight of the horizon at 0, and I have a very reflective object, It renders funny little black stuff towards the center of the image. It happen to me with two different projects that happened to have skies. It took a bunch of setting changes to figure out that it was the Ground Hight that was introducing this to my renders. I was about to report it as a bug, but since it had a workaround I didn't. I did notice that if you mess around with the sky dialog box long enough, you can get some decent results.