goldcatlizard; Both Vue4 and VuePro with a nice little 4 box rendergarden sitting at my right; see attached photo (the Cow for each version installed on my main system is node 5). With VuePro, 5 nodes is all you can run out of the box; there is a for pay add-on that boosts the limit to 25. And you are not actually 'starting' the RenderCow; that happens when you start the actual boxes in the renderfarm. You are -adding- a new node to a distributed render process. And I'm afraid they do work that way; there are two large data dumps to a cow as it joins the queue; the textures in one lump pool, and the scene geometry and parameters. Once -that- is accomplished, and the Cow is actually rendering a frame, the network traffic drops to (a) retrieving the completed frame, and (b)sending scene update info to be applied to the resources at each Cow. Neither Vue app has the kinds of network control that something like Max or Maya has, simply because they are not multi-thousand dollar applications. Someone with a more robust network may not have those issues; in fact they shouldn't. But =my= network is a Netgear router 4 port switch (gotta have my hardware firewall and NAT, as I'm on cable), feeding me, my wife's machine, a print server I'm working on, and my rendergarden through a no-name 5 port switch. Not exactly highest tech. But it does work.