i just have to scream, here.... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! okay, now i know vue is flaky about resuming renders to disk from the get-go. so i should have known better than to tell it to render to arabesqueg1.bmp instead of arabesqueg1.vue.bmp. but i was smart, you see. i copied my arabesqueg1.bmp from my f:svuepictures directory to my stupid 'my pictures' directory, and even made it say .vue.bmp. just in case it rendered where i wanted it to, it had the file in BOTH places. and yet, both .bmp and .vue.bmp look like this. which leads me to say, "vue, where the @(&%#&% did you put my image!!??!" or perhaps, "what did you DO with it after rendering for nearly 80 hours over the course of two weeks??!" :: to top it off, i can't get vue to tell me where it thinks it goes. because when i hit 'browse' on the 'save colour image' dialogue, nothing happens. i can't browse. which, okay, is pretty much a safety feature, since changing where vue wants to put the image will mess up the resume rendering. but did it have to be WORSE than it used to be? with the .vue in there? and to 'my pictures' instead of vue's directory? ::sigh:: and DO i still have to, in ver 5 (regular d'esprit), save the file after each rendering session? which i did! but i noticed it has a separate 'saving resume render info' status bar, so... i dont know, maybe the resume render info is somewhere besides in the file? but, faithfully, i hit stop render and then re-saved the file, so i could open it next time and resume from where it left off. ::sigh:: well... at least the 16/32 min/max sampling on the soft shadows on the floor plane look smooth. so far. from what you can see of them.