If you have a cylinder with thick smoke volumetrics material applied, (left smoke column) it looks good. Now, add another cylinder, (right smoke column) sphere, anything, and the smoke gets all crappy. I would like to know how to make some good smoke columns, and not have to resort to metas, and slow down my renders. Thanks.

Which version of Vue and which OS ?

Monsoon will soon have a product available at 3D Commune that has some fantastic smoke materials (I beta tested it).  One of the things I noticed is that he does not use volumetrics, but rather fuzzy materials.  They also rendered much quicker than the volumetric materials. 

This is a link to some preview pictures...
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?message_id=3189486&ebot_calc_page#message_3189486

Vue 6 pro studio XP

Two of the factors are going to be the mapping mode used and the noise/fractal/turbulence node parameters.

Default on both mapping and n/f/t, it is just curious to me why another object being near the original causes this. Both objects have the exact same material.

Unticking the "Use distance field" option seems to make things behave the way that you might expect.
Some adjustment of the other paramters is in order to get back a more smoke like appearence.

I just tested it in my system and it works just fine. I used the "thick gray smoke" default in Vue, without any changes, in default cylinders. Maybe you have to go into more detail as to what do you do exactly so that any of us can help.

I don't why Vue does that with volume materials, but I've seen it many times. 

I believe the final volumetric material scale is dependent on the scale of the volumetric container.  How so?  I don't know.  Maybe somebody knows about this relationship between volume material and volume material container.

Quote - I just tested it in my system and it works just fine. I used the "thick gray smoke" default in Vue, without any changes, in default cylinders.

The oddness happens when you put one cylinder on top of the other (even if you turn them both into one meta object).

The answer is in the definition of "Use distance field" :- > Quote - Use distance field: when this option is enabled, the volumetric density takes into account the depth

inside the object. The density will automatically increase as you go deeper inside the object. When
this option is checked, the Field depth parameter becomes active, letting you indicate the depth at
which the density function reaches its maximum value.

This introduces a dependence on the shape of each individual object which isn't what's wanted in this case.