e-on musta heard i was coming, their site was down... ;) anyway...check out the pic, here. compare it to the top pic. hmmmm! okay, well, its obvious that rendering to disk, stopping, saving to a new file name, and then resuming doesnt work too hot. but, on the other hand, it worked better than i had thought before. yes, i was able to use the magic wand to grab the black rectangles in the top one and invert the selection to get the strips, and then paste them into the messed up parts of the other, all nice and seamlessly. wish i'd found that out before i spent all day rendering more patches. so, okay... i did that. my fault. except you gotta wonder why vue kept changing my image name each time. (yes, i found a hawkd1.bmp and a hawkd2.bmp). of course, since it insisted on changing my hawkd1.tif into hawkd1.tifbmp between renders, i can't be too surprised.