Thanks to everyone for the good advice so far. I thought I'd jump back in here and give an update on the rendersaga. Since I posted the question I went ahead and rendered the scene with a 300 dpi, 2000 X 1125 resolution, standard antialias final setting, with render to disk. Vue went to work on it just fine. I didn't monitor it too closely but it seemed to finish it in about an hour to an hour and a half. The Vue display then went blank and it showed the status at 100% finished. At this point I decided to go online and come here to look up "render to disk" comments in the forum and see what I could find out about this phenonema before I did anything drastic. I will mention also that there was no activity on the hard drive at all regarding Vue before I went on line, so it definitely crashed. After reading over a bunch of comments about similar situations (and nightmares!), I decided to just "end task" Vue and restart it. It did ask me if I wanted to recover the color channel and also the depth channel image. I said yes and told it were to store the files. I then opened them in photoshop and they both looked ok with no noticable defects. The size of the color image was 28 X 15 1/2 inches, 2000 X 1125 resolution, but the reslolution was 72 ppi not 300! So more experimenting is in order (does it ever really end?). After reading over the other threads about render to disk or not rendering to disk I don't know what to think. Thanks again to everyone for their comments so far.