Here's another side point: there are some major performance gains in rendering between OS 9 and OS X (both unpatched and patched). I haven't gotten around to timing things out yet, but the "OS X native" version of Carrara 2.0 seems to render about half as fast as my OS 9 install (I got bored a while ago and started trying cross render tests.) I haven't played with the Spooky animation, so I'll do some experiments. By the way, I'm on a dual 1 gHz...I wonder if that step up to the new machine is really that big of a speed bump?