Quote -  From your description, you are hitting the limitations of your system, not Carrara. Your scene render settings are using everything Carrara has. The one thing Carrara needs for a scene like that is tons of memory - 2G is not enough. 

Mark

I made the stupid choice of a premade system, I will add 2 gigs of Ram but the limitation will come from Vista 32bits ...
It seems quite hard to find an Xp64pro version nowadays, notwithstanding the price.

If carrara was running under linux it would so simpler ...
YA