CompuServe Thread

I have a question regarding crashing during rendering and wonder if anyone has any idea what it could be. I talked with Autodeesk Tech Support and they don't have a clue either. Here's what's happening. During rendering the system hangs. But if I turn off shadows or reduce the verticies, it will render to completion. So, crashing is render size/complexity-dependent. My guess is that when it attempts to go out to the virtual disk for extra memory, it fails. Yet I get the usual AOBBABAO file with 0 bytes in the root when I return indicating that it did attempt to write something. This condition is new to me but is related to my model size – its the largest I built on this system, about 75,000 vertices. Here's what I have and what I've done. The system is Micronics 486 with 32 MB of RAM with 132 MB remaining on a 1.2 gB disk. I use a Vista board and Hecules Graphite board and use QEMM. The system fails on my backup of 3ds. I stripped QEMM, checked CFIG386 values, verified 3DS.SET values, CHKDSKed, and spent about 3 days so far trying to diagnose the problem. The file renders OK on other systems. The sad part of the story is that I had a deadline to meet. So after a few weeks of work and only hours left till deadline, I couldn't get the system running and lost the contract – and $4000. Any ideas? Thanks – Gregory MacNicol