Grrrr!  One of my renders for the challenge has frozen at the antialiasing phase. 0% for the past hour, at least.. At least that's what I discovered when I woke up this morning... maybe for more hours. Any clue how to continue it?

It wasn't being rendered in my farm, maybe I should've done it that way. Computer is an AMD Turion 64 X2 (dual core) with 2 gigs ram, 200 gig HD (so it's not like... running out of HD space if it needs it). Rendering for about 6 hours then... 0%... still 0% antialiasing even as I type this... Task manager reports B6.1 has not frozen... it's responding.. i can stop the render, save the file, etc, and continue, but it doesn't get past the 0%. Any idea?

I've got this bug on both the PC and Mac and I've never found a way to get it going. Just like you, on both platforms, B6.1 is not hung 'cause I can click out of the render. Saving and resuming doesn't seem to be working either. It's been mentioned that turning off 48-bit dithering and re-rendering can solve this,but that's not working for me. The way I'm working around it is to not use Normal AA and using 16RPP Premium mode. MacPro/10.4.7 and Pentium D WinXP.

I'd forgotten how slow this renderer is :(, would switching from 5 to 6.1 speed things up a great deal, sure I saw a becnh mark thread somewhere? reminds me why I'm using blender more and bryce less.....

Wow, I haven't had that happen at all.

Your Task Manager, what will it state as CPU usage when this freezing happens?

It's going up and down but not 100%. 

I'm setting up another machine (another dual core AMD 64 X2 - 2.27 GHz, 2 gig ram)  with B6.1 to see if it'll handle the file.... trying to continue where the other left off.

Strange and stranger....

But first, @ Dan Whiteside: thanks for the input on this. Later I'll do some testing and will try that to see if there's any result.

And now: the second dual core has the same problem... so I take the file to a third computer, one which I use for serious programming. It's an old faithful... and guess what? That render works here. It's an older machine, AMD Athlon XP 2400+, 2 GHz.

But now this is my suspicion:
  The dual cores were probably rendering, but the AA percentage counter was not updating. Why I think this is because on this older machine, as soon as I loaded the file and Bryce came up, it continued at 20%. From 0% to 20% in like.. an instant. Is possible if it's just a black background, but there's stuff there which would've taken a little bit of time. Furthermore, I have rendered a similar image (same one but with less objects) and I'm familiar with the speed it took to render AA between 0 and 20%.

  So I think the AA percentage update counter wasn't refreshing, yet the AA was progressing. There wasn't any render line either. I might be wrong and that no rendering was occuring... hard to know without better testing. Since the challenge date is getting close, I'll leave the testing for later.

**The dual cores were probably rendering, but the AA percentage counter was not updating.

**I don't have the situation in front of me, but I would tend to agree...if you are getting a percentage flux in your cpu usage, I would think Bryce was doing something....and that situation (rendering, but no gui updating to show it was rendering), I have seen. (But not in 6.1)