Not sure what all you checked other than what was mentioned here, so I'll do this by the numbers and see if we can't figure this out. First off, what do you mean you have set the shadow color to black? If you have set the color for the light to black, than that is probably your problem. Try setting the color to white and see what happens. If that doesn't do it, than check your render setting and make sure that render with shadows is check. If it is, check your dial setting on the lights and make sure the shadow dial is not set to 0 but is set to 1 or atleast a higher setting than zero. Also see what the map size is. The default is 256 but you will probably want to change this to around 1024 or higher. If all these are set right. Try this. Since you are only using two lights, add two more lights to the scene. Using the copy and paste command in the edit drop down, copy the setting for the two lights you have to the two new lights. Go to properties, and turn off the 2 old lights, and render the picture. I have had lights get corrupted on me before and not render properly and this always has fixed the problem. So give it a try. Hopefully one of these will fix the problem. Rob