CompuServe Messages

Hello, I'm diligently working my way through the 3ds3 tutorials. While playing around with tutorial #2 (adding and changing lights, materials etc.) I rendered several scenes to the buffer when suddenly the renderer hung. I would choose Render View, then choose the Camera viewport. The "Rendering In Progress" box would appear, and just when it said "Preparing Mesh" it would hang. I could press ESC and get back to the 3d Editor or anything else, but anytime I tried to render, the same thing would happen. Would this be a memory problem? I didn't think so since I'm just rendering one fairly simple image and have rendered some of the more complex scenes that come with 3ds with no problem. I'm running 3ds on a 486\66 with 12 MB of RAM. Thanks, HH