CompuServe Messages

I am very frustrated!! I have a SVGA card, 1024×768 w/ 256 colors, which will of course handle everything below that. My driver seems to work fine. I can render all of the images that came with 3ds rel 1 beautifully, in any resolution I want. I can also use the materials editor, and view any of the materials. But when I try and render my own creations, using anything but the simplest material (translation – any texture material) the whole thing blows up. My renderings come out completely, glowing white. I first thought it was a problem with only 256 colors available (translation – it used up too many of the color slots doing the basic "grey-paint" surface and couldn't handle the pitted-metal) so I tried reoff ndering a single cube with just pitted metal, No luck. The side away from me was the color of the ambient light, and the main surface facing the light was pure white. SO I tried rendering the thing at 320×200 VGA. I figured if it can render it in the materials editor at this resolution, it should render it here too. Still didn't work. Any ideas? I've tried just about everything I can think of. What is it about the sample drawings that they can use textures, and fancy colors, and there's no problem, but I can't even get something like brick to work? Thanks for any ideas… James.