Well, like Warangel, I finally got around to RTFM, and there's a considerable amount of great information in it, even for those who never want to use the service. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in optimizing their rendering times and chances for success.

In the manual, it's pointed out to start the render at the desired resolution FIRST on one's own machine, just to make sure there's not any memory errors. Of course, they say to interrupt it once it gets started. Good idea. They also mention a system for predicting render times for upscaling a scene. Good stuff.

Here's the only problem I know of. How does one know if there's copy protected materials in a scene? For instance, a long time ago, I used a texture for a headlight from a purchased copy protected model, then tweaked it substantially to create a different texture effect. I believe I saved it as a totally different named texture, and have since melded it with other textures, on and on.

At the time, I didn't know the copy protection 'sticks' with all the derivative textures (I do now). Even so, many of my original models may have a part of them textured with this copy protected texture. So, how can I tell? Of course they render fine on my machine, but I would certainly hate for them to show a problem when I'm purchasing time on a renderfarm.

Perhaps someone knows of an easy way to tell if you have copy protected textures, or objects, in a scene?