Another problem is that a surface with Emit > 0 doesn`t light objects behind a glass even when their textures have the TraSha on.

And why desn`t the tv set secreen light anything although other objects with Emit > 0 do?

Maybe some of you know a decent TV screen tutorial for Blender? Unfortunately, I can`t achieve this effect on the error-and-trial basis.

I've gotten the weird shading problems like in the image before, I even managed to get rid of them--but I can't remember how.  I'm pretty sure it involved increasing quality settings though.  Haven't got time for the next several days, but I'll see if I can reproduce what I did before on the weekend if no one else can help you out before then.  I've had problems with glass with this sort of thing, too.

Really, though, I'd just use a light with really soft buffer shadows for something like this, unless there's a reason you can't?

Have you tried using Yafray instead?  I gave up on the Radiosity in blender after I received better results from Yafray.

Well, I had a little time today to mess around with Radiosity some more. Reddog9 is right, Yafray is an actual GI renderer, while Blender's radiosity feature is only a fake. But 1. I hate Yafray and the hours and hours of my life I have wasted waiting for test render after test render to finally get it to look like I want, and 2, with the ability to turn the radiosity solving into vertex colors, and with the texture baker, I think I might could make some really cool textures for my models.

Anyways, after getting involved in another thread, here is the 3d view of a default UVsphere after applying radiosity with the default settings.

Notice the deformations on even the flattest of flat plane! But the main problem is the concentration of tris at the top of the sphere. In the Radio Tool tab, I used these settings

Elmax:20, Elmin:10, Pamax:50,Pamin25   and got this...

This seemed to cure almost everything except the tris. Note that this sphere is not subsurfed, only smoothed. The solving time was 302375ms, which is kinda long for me (I am impaitent) but not too bad. I want to try more stuff when I can, and Ill post it. when I do.

Does it improve if you turn the tris into quads (ie combine every two faces at the top of the sphere into a single 4-sided face)?

Hmmm lets see!

Ok, I think you mean doing this....

I got that by selecting all the tris at the top and pressing J. Then I tried doin the radiosity solution again, with the same settings as before and got this....

Fixed! You are a genius haloedrain. For kicks, right before I go to bed, I wanted to try an icosphere with a subdivision of 4.

Still a nice smooth result, probably because of the high subdivision, i dunno. These are all screen captures from the 3D view, I haven't gotten into the Radiosity rendering yet. The controls seem a little more sparse there, and I see nothing about Patches and Elements. Im pretty sure Silgrin was using the Radiosity during render anyway, which was the whole point of this thread, lol, so all this is prolly no use to him. I will check that out next, if my interest holds, and if noone else beats me to it :)

Yeah, it seems like weird distortions like that tend to happen in places where the geometry is a little funny, no matter which version of blender radiosity you use.  I'm not sure that's what's wrong with the image in the first post, though, but I guess it's a place to start.