I've been testing Vue7 infinite area lights.
now, I found them making too much noise still, and tried vast amount of different render and even atmosphere (light) adjustments).

What seems ot have the biggest effect, by a vast amount, is to edit the light, edit the shadows, and ramp up the light rays to an enormous amount, say 400 or more on each slider.
that gives smooth shadows!

render time is not as bad as if you had used very high custom render settings.

am adding this to my lighting tutorial soon with demosntration pics :)

thanks for the tips ... i just started to use an area light for a desktop lamp in an interior scene.

Area lights have always sucked for me, can never get a decent look from them, I always end up with black spots all over everything!

They just don't generate enough photons to give smooth light under regular conditions - I keep area lights small for this reason.

area lights give beautiful looks though for some scenes..ifyou whack the photon count up! :)

Ok I added in depth stuff on this into my lighting tutorial which I updated :)

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/22.html

As Silverblade posted his settings twice I guess I'll put my question/comment twice too -you dont have to read/answer  it twice:)
I dont understand the logic of having min rays = max rays. As I understand it from the description in the manual, the process is (whenever you have the options of min/max rays &threshold):

1. send the minimum amount of rays
2. check threshold - if it was achieved stop.
3. if it wasnt achieved, continue to send more rays till the max number of rays was achieved or the threshold was achieved, what ever happens first.

So it makes sense to start with the  smallest number of rays you can in the hope that the threshold is achieved and you wont have to send any more. If you chose a too low number it will have to keep checking if the quality is met(that takes time too). So if you know by experience that a certain number definitely  wont do the job, set it higher.
Max number should be bigger than min number, so it continues till a good result is obtained.
Logically  the process should stop when the required quality is achieved, not when the max rays limit is met. The 'max ' is only there as a precaution, in case the resources dont allow you to achieve the quality you want- you dont want it to run forever.

In your setting it will send 400 initial  rays and then check for the quality threshold. if the threshold was reached it will stop - but maybe a lot less would have been OK too, it never had a chance to check earlier. If the threshold wasnt achieved - well too bad it will still stop anyhow because the max number =min number was achieved. You might as well set the threshold to 0%.
(It would be nice to be able to get some feedback from the program as to the reason it stopped sending rays on average - threshold achived(and how many rays where needed) or  max number achieved (and what was the threshold when that happened). Would be easier to learn what a good strategy is. I guess that is too much to ask from e-on developers?)

Of course, it is entirely possible I didnt understand the process correctly - please enlighten me:)

 I believe the idea is that a min/max of 400/400 will never achieve 100% quality. So, he's just forcing 400 rays--period.

Ah good, I did understand correctly how it works.
This cannot be an efficient strategy. it means it applies 400 rays to each pixel, disregarding if it's needed or not. The quality achieved in the areas where it didnt look good by default (shadow and near shadow) is good now. It  means in all other areas -background, well lit areas on the figure - too many rays have been sent. These areas were already OK even in the default. Thus, it should have been possible to achieve the same result overall by setting min lower than max and setting a realistic quality threshold(less than 100%).
E-on designed it correctly with 3 adjustable parameters. Using only parameter is bound to be less efficient. (again, I wish we knew what the quality actually achieved was).

well, I did a test with 4/400 or such and never noticed any real change in render times.
I wanted to make sure, by  using 400/400 the quality was A OK by forcing, and it's simple to remember lol :)

I'll give a test with a variable pair of numbers on a much more complex scene, at 400/400 it is gonna take about 40 hours. but looks beautiful (what has been done).

gonna ask E-On about this, as the default setting is totally USELESS for Area lights, so why have it set so bad in the first place?

If it's implemented correctly in the program, the only thing which will insure A OK quality or at least consistent quality is the quality threshold being checked.
Good idea to get e-on's comment on the issue - let us know what they say.

You maybe right ont he minimum rays being lower for complex scenes, form a test! very simpel scenes are ok, but highly complex ones do render much slower at 400/400
well I'll need to tweak my tutorial! thanks though :)