hello litst, kix, and anyone else who's interested...

i played a bit with the settings you gave, litst. seems your machine is about 3 times faster than mine. sigh.

anyway, the shadows still band a bit. i suppose adding more segments and facets will solve this problem, but that will also slow down rendering.

the final image will have a lot of transparency and reflection, so i'm probably going to go with bulbs.

i tried a row of 7 bulbs, but the highlight begin to separate. back to the string of 40 and kix's idea of turning the fall off to 100. this did a decent job of reducing the light cast on the far wall.

i think i'm going to experiment more in that direction.

thanks out to both of you for giving me input on this.

-scott