turn down the subdivision modifier amount 2 divisions. turn on smoothing.  all this can be done from the buttons panel-->edit thingy. maybe you should post the file. let some of us experiment with it.  a scene that simple with simple materials should not take a long time.  if your working with the blender internal turn off ambient occlusion.  

of course, you could have found some sort of bug. 

yah, its awesome, not tips and tricks yet.  i just wish that when addint multiers it doesnt unhide whats already hidden.  beleive it or not, i can do two more subdivisions in blender than i can do in sharp construct. 
Sort of off topic but...
 the equivelent of sharpconstructs inflate tool in blender is to give all the verticies a base color of white, then click scripts, edit-dispaint and change the mode to normal and orientation to  normal.  it took me a while to figure this out.  very usefull for making skin layers in indigo or gelato.  i actualy use this teqhnique realy often when sculpting.

now that i think about it,  it makes sense that this is very tricky.  try playing with stuff like exposure time and white ballance, like in photography.  if you turn on a flashlight in full daylight, its pretty hard to see if its on or off due to its light being soo faint compared to the sun's light.

i've played around with indigo alot, but never with that.  are you using the 7 test?  is the meshlight in camera view?  if the meshlight is in camera view then you could turn bidirectional on in indigo 6.  I have heard of this problem before,  i think your better off faking the sunlight if its an indoor scene with lighting as well as sunlight

you can get gimp for windows, as well as Inkscape.  for your actual install of linux i would not recomend PCLinuxOS.  i also would not have recomended buying the cd, as linux is free.

it works well, realy well.  if you switch to linux i recomend ubuntu or kubuntu (NOT SUSE- bad experiences)
blender actualy works better in linux supposedly as there is more ram for it to use and less backround processes.  the ui is generaly either very much like a mac (gnome)  or very much like windows (kde)
lots of scripts made for blender in python were actualy made using a linux so by using linux more scripts will work for you.
however, going from windows or mac which have complete graphical interfaces to a linux which uses lots of command line to get simple tasks done is tricky,  so keep windows installed partialy before you make your full switch
if blender is installed it loads from the "start menu" like in windows. 

if double verticies doesnt work (not only in edit mode, in object mode)  try yafray!!!!  its not as hart as you'd think to master.  

autodialers?  thats not realy so great.  when there is spywhere, there is a trojan.  i have learned that the hard way.

that scene isnt tooooo complicated.   but the fan thingy is a bit complicated,  try turning it off and seeing what happens.  

or... try using yafray,  you might get better results and faster speed.  or kerkythea, or sunflow (particularly fast)

however,  there are something that might supprisingly be a nasty.  check for overlapping verticies,  if two meshes are placed ontop of each other tooo perfectly,  it could cause problems, no idea why, but i've seen it happen.

there are tons of things you can do.  how fast are your renders normaly for what scenes?  try reducing the samples. how complicated is the scene your using?  unless your rendering in gelato, the graphics card is not important.  

from the size of the memory being used i'd say that the scene is way to detailed.    

try using yafray, its generaly faster.

it could also be a virus.  if its not to much trouble, you could try rendering on another computer or maybe even reinstall windows (or linux, i recomend kubuntu or ubuntu)

property key frames can be added by clicking i while the mouse is over the property selector/button that you want to make the keyframe for

after a while of tweaking, i discovered that the gelato exporter for blender does not handle materials well at all.  if you want to try it i would recomend adding the shader link you want for each material, then going into the file yourself and editing the parimiters- one of the major bugs is that after changing a parimiter in the plugin for a shader it jumps to another material.  nothing important is messed up,  its just realy annoying.  clicking on the material you want to view also does not show the correct material.  

after some playing around i figured out how to use an SSS shader (not supported well from the plugin).  it requires some basic editing of the file.  basicaly, what i ended up doing was writing a .bat file and coppying the exported file and calling it something different.  after that i changed the shader in the new file of material with sss to be the same as that seen in the example subsurface file.

most materials work fine with the plugin,  its only materials that access the shadowmap that are not supported yet.  i using sliders instead of inputs would also make this plugin nicer.  i will write a tutorial for using sss in gelato from blender eventualy (possibly this weekend!)

a renderer made by Nvidia which is free!  it renders images on the gpu rather than the cpu while maintaining programable abilities.  it includes AO, semi-unbiased raytracing, shadowmaps, and radiosity.  it uses programable shaders so basicaly its just like a longer featured renderman for the gpu.  

Most importantly - IT HAS REAL SSS SHADERS.  and these sss shaders do not slow it down.  it only takes maybe 5 more miniutes to render a picture with some sss in it.

you actualy didnt have to delete it,  you could have added a coppy of the material

ok,  your using the same material for all the objects,  ad a new material for each object.

upload it to a file host and link to it.  i think your problem though is that your changing the color of the same material

to test this change the name of one of the materials and see if the rest change as well

blender works by not making each material for each object but by making universal materials and allowing you to apply them to the objects.  

to fix this next to the name of the material there is a scroller. click on the scroler and click add new material.  name your new material and change away.  i doubt its a bug because i never have any trouble like this with materials