I've just wasted another 14 hours or so trying to re-render an image. After the render apparently finishes, a new step begins "Anti-aliasing glow" that I've not seen before. To cut a long story short, Vue has crashed for a second time during this new step and I've nothing to show for all the global warming I've just caused. Is this as a result of choosing a particular material ? I've upped the Advanced Effects slider to try and rid the image of noise to 99% too. Can I opt not to have this step ?

if you have a material with a glow property (seen on the last tabe of the advanced material editor) - examples are the stock atmosphere material and the Yellow Glow material - and if you have anti-aliasing turned on for your render, then you will get this step. it shouldn't cause a crash, though, it was probably something else on your computer depriving Vue of ram. Though who knows, it's buggy software.

Glowing materials can cause crashes when using network rendering, but not when rendering on a single machine. Maybe you should try rerendering, with lower quality settings to see if the crash happens again at the glow AA stage, and then report to Tech support.

I've removed the glowing material from the scene and the latest re-render worked fine. I guess that's something I'll have to avoid in future.

Contact tech support, this issue was supposed to be fixed, and apparently, it's still there, just like negative lights that still don't work. (although I know for sure they are fixed in the upcoming 5.10)