numanoid; Your place of employment hasn't installed any port sniffer software lately, have they? Or swapped out routers and switches? From what I've seen of the Cow activity, the outbound traffic from the render controller -could- be interpreted as potentially dangerous, and the return signal treated as an intrusion, causing security software to lock that port. And locking the port on a Cow render -will- cause Vue to CTD. If this is occuring across -all- the machines you are using there, involving multiple OS's (particularly 98, which MS doesn't really support anymore) it almost has to be an issue in the infrastructure. You might ask the bosses about the status of ports 5000 and 5002. Some security freak might have tagged 'all unused ports'as potential holes, to be plugged at any sign of activity.