no... I haven't read up on it because there's no way we're springing to buy Max when we have 60 licenses or something like that for VIZ2006.  Thanks for the heads-up.

Vue 6 claims to have fixed the 'not rendered in the background' issue, and claims to have improved the rendering.  I am intrigued by painting plants onto my terrains, but am scared it will be unstable with my imported terrain meshes from Sketchup.  for $300 we can try it and see... if they actually got it to work, I would then think about buying more copies.

Yes I would say Vray is becoming THEway.  But for exteriors, Mental Ray is fairly simple to use and it comes bundled with VIZ.  Vray is an independant thing, so that's why they went with Mental Ray compatibility, anyone with Max and Vray also has Mental Ray... so I guess they figured they hit everyone in one shot that way... but I LOVE the VRAY stuff I'm seeing out there.  And I see Mray appears to be no fun to work with for interiors.