yes, but its not easily controlable and its currently glitchy, i recomend xml, its actualy realy easy.

scenes that are made for the blender internal can not be guarenteed to work in yafray, lighting has to be made specificaly for yafray in most cases, and materials have to be made specificaly.  the texture should work if it is the only texture on the material, but you need to make sure the normal is facing the correct direction.  on the glass window, make sure you have fresnell mirror turned all the way up.  if you want to light that scene with only the lamp, you need to turn on global gi in the yafray gi panel.  turn it up to full, and then low.  enable photons and cache and turn the refinement down all the way.  this should do the trick of lighting the whole scene with light reflected off of the walls.

when i was playing with it, it never seemed to use any of my graphics cards, only one core, and i could never figure out how to get it to use both my cpu cores

actualy, after looking at the new site, it does now have multi cpu support

i've tried it, personaly, if your into unbiased renderers or hybrids, i prefer sunflow or indigo, they work a bit better and come out with nicer images.

its not even that its necessary for animation, its necessary in general.  when you learn about proper topology and start thinking out your mesh before you create it(now we can create then think yay)  it becomes easier to model, you find that what you are creating comes out much nicer much quicker and is easier to edit.

right now, i am working on remodeling my head with retopo, and its coming out way better than what i had expected.  what i think would be cool if we could start a retopo topology tricks thread because just knowing how to press the retopo button wont fix your topology.  but the paint part i have not been able to figure out whatsoever. 

i have a clue how to write, usualy, i'll think about doing something when i finish the nodes tutorial and the 3 tests i have coming up. first, i'd need to learn to use the retopo tool.  it seems to be kind of like a constrain to floor except with every vertex, and constrain to surface of mesh.

when started blender, i happened to be interested in stuff like caustics and realism, so for the first couple months, thats all i concentrated on, and i had virtualy no modeling experience.  i had all that information on how to make these cool materials, but nothing to put them on.  i guess it realy doesnt matter where you start, its allways going to take a while before you learn both parts. 

ok, just figured out how to get it a reasonable size while preserving all the quality.  i will upload this to my website.

looking at the pdf, i realize that the jpeg quality needs to be enhanced, and probably i need to turn off "optimize for web" in the pdf compression settings to get page 2 to work

yah, i realized that, i think that might be a problem with how i uploaded it

http://www.sharebigfile.com/file/77756/nodetut2-pdf.html

uploaded it to a host just in case

the length controls the amount of emitance rather than the value.    also turn on ray trace and set that to 16.  make the length so it reaches the model and set the intensity to 1

yes, about that highly exagerated number of times, and actualy the only problems i have ever had installing blender were with cvs and release candidate versions, and once when the installer was corrupt because of an incomplete download, but that was due to an ie problem.

actualy, one of the things i love about blender is its stability under virtualy all circumstances, so there are realy very few errors that are common.  i have installed it now on maybe 30 computers a couple hundred times and i have never encountered a problem at all.