After waiting 12 hours for a render to finish last night and saving the .bmp, it refused to open.
Something about "corrupt file". Damn!!!!
Not only would it not open, I couldn't even send it to the recycle bin or delete it from my desktop.
On starting my PC this morning the file has disappeared altogether.
I don't normally have the patience to wait that long for a render but it did look very nice with ambient occlusion lighting.
It might make me feel a bit better if others shared similar experiences. Twelve hours is huge for me but I'm sure others have worse tales to tell. Bring them on.

Fortunetaly, I don't have any horror story. My life with Vue is very "peaceful". :-)

But I'm intrigued why is it 12 hours "huge" for you? If it fits more or less within one night, that's fine, IMO. Normally, I try to finish the scene just before going to bed or going to work, hit the render button and when I return, the render is finished, or I have to wait just 1 or 2 hours more. So, 12 hours seems fairly ok to me. 

In fact, if I have a render that lasts less than 8 hours, I feel it's a waste of processing power because the computer was just sitting there idle all that time while I was sleeping. :-)

In order to fit within the time I have, I change the render settings, watch the forecast duration, adjust render settings, watch forecast duration, until it fits more or less.

I'm going to start the render before work tomorrow.
I really don't like leaving the PC on while I'm out (fire risk etc.) but I really want this one.
Maybe the Poser import stuffed things up.
I work from 6:30 to 4:30 (I'm a teacher), so that should do most of it.
As for 12 hours being big, it is for me. Three or four is my usual, if that.
I also agree that Vue is usually a peaceful experience, in fact I love this program.

 turn off motion blur if you're not using it, and also depth of field if you don't want it in your render settings.  That might help speed things up.
Love esther

Ashley, If it makes you feel any better - I had a render tonight that took 9 hours. I'm not complaining about the length, pretty usual for my renders. But when I looked th the image this morning - all my ecos disappeared. The only few trees remaining where put there as objects.  As they were all painted, it is annoying -takes time and doesnt look as nice as I remember it :(
Cant tell if it was a v7comp bug or a 'me' bug. Although how I managed to clear the population of 3 ecos in one unintentional go, I have no idea. Sad either way.

I had a render going the other night, only to wake to find materials decided to play switch-a-roo :cursing:  My owl became a strawberry, with blueberry legs.  A set of trees suddenly took on the mat of what, I still haven't figured out!  So, I had to redo/re-import etc quite a few things.  I will try re-rendering again tonight.

I encourage people to use that "User" render type and learn what all those settings do and about what each costs in render time. Then you can get max render speed for whatever quality you're willing to wait for.
 
Some render engine settings that slow you way down, if your materials need them:
   * Blurred transparency
   * Blurred reflections (very slow)
   * Optimize volumetrics
   * Caustics
   * Depth of field 
   * Soft shadows (very slow) use the settings in the Light and Shadow editor for speed, not AA,

Lighting that's slow:
   * Volumetrics
   * Soft shadows
   * Advanced clouds or terrains

Objects:
   * Poser imports with the usual huge texture files (you can always make those smaller in Photoshop or another image editor.
   * Complex imported buildings and environments

Also, you don't need to make huge sized renders for posters and such. Use PhotoZoom Pro to instantly upsize your 1024 or 2048 renders. I've gone up to 6K pixels with no visible loss of quality.

HTH

Thanks guys for the advice.
It rendered OK today, horror story ends here. But there could be a sequel.

 I try and always do a preview render at smaller resolution just to check and make sure there are no serious 'gotchas'. Also, a preview render can often provide a clue as to how long a finished render may take. IOW, if a preview render takes forever, then so will the finished one.

For large renders, I sometimes set atmosphere to Global Ambient, and move way down the sky dome quality (-2 or lower) and do a 'final' render at lower resolution to check on details.

Sometimes, if I use a huge proc terrain or large hypertexture, it can take 20+ hours on a quad core system-- in those cases I just use my laptop for other work :-)

All of my horror stories have to do with animations.  From flickering, to odd triangles or squares, or funny textures, just to name a few VUE HAS FAILED ME MANY TIMES.   Most of the problems happen after the low res animation has been approved because with
VUE the Devil is in the Details

Now, I use it just for stills because the program is sort of a joke for animations.

All of my horror stories have to do with animations.  From flickering, to odd triangles or squares, or funny textures, just to name a few VUE HAS FAILED ME MANY TIMES.   Most of the problems happen after the low res animation has been approved because with
VUE the Devil is in the Details

Now, I use it just for stills because the program is sort of a joke for animations.

My horror story involved an ex mother-in-law.

...being stuck with the installation of 7 Infinite, starting to fear of having just thrown down the drain more than 300 euros... then I checked the e-mail account and found the mail with the code to install the program, necessary step in order to be able to activate it... simple, isn't it?

Bye!!!