I have a D|S crash bug that seems to manifest with files of moderate complexity/texture usage - usually 2-3 figures and a prop set. It's been VERY frustrating as I usually have no idea if a file will render properly until I'm done with hours of modeling. It crashes in the rendering phase, not in the shadow map calculation. Once I know a file is crash-prone I can reproduce it with 100% success. The log file has been little help, simply indicating that the last recorded instruction was to initiate the 3Delight renderer. I also sometimes get a Windows app error box, which will state "The instruction at "XXX" referenced memory at "YYY". The memory can not be read." I checked the RAM for errors back in Jan. as one of my first troubleshooting sets. It came up fine.

I ran D|S for almost 12 months without this bug showing up. I think it started with v.1.46, but I'm not sure that was it as I put in the mirrored drives about the same time.

I'm running D|S 1.5 under XP on a 3GHz P4 with 3GB RAM. My hard drive config. is a 300GB serial ATA hard drive with a RAID mirror duplicate. I have third ATA serial drive, non-mirrored, and have assigned the system pagefile to it. The video card is on the motherboard. Specs from the log file show the following stats:

    OpenGL provider: Intel
    OpenGL renderer: Intel 915G
    OpenGL version: 1.4.0 - Build 4.14.10.3847
    Maximum number of lights: 16
    Number of auxiliary buffers: 0
    Number of texture units: 8
    Depth buffer bit resolution: 16
    Maximum OpenGL texture size: 2048 x 2048
    Current OpenGL Texture Quality Setting: Best Quality
    RGBA color bitplane resolutions: 8 8 8 8
    GLSL not supported
    Shadow mapping supported

I'm really getting desperate to solve this and am rapidly running out of ideas. If anyone has any suggestions (or more questions to ask before speculating), PLEASE chime in. I'd also love to hear if anyone out there is seeing a similar thing.

--R