re: the bucket. I just rendered a 300-frame animation (I'll post it in a new thread later). And I did an experiment. 

First, the frames were getting the 'out-of-memory' message in P6 with the bucket set at 64.  So, I put the bucket down to 32 and it worked. Render time was about 219 seconds per frame.

When I switched yesterday to my new P7 on the same computer, I started at 64 and did not get the error. So I kicked the bucket up. to 128, then 256, then 512. I got NO MEMORY ERRORS on the identical .pz3. Render time went down to 143 seconds at 256, but did not increase at 512 so I did not try to go higher.

I do NOT have a dual core or processor, etc.

AMD 3500+ 
4 GIG RAM
Twin raptor 10,000 rpm HD in raid 0
XP Pro sr2+patches

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