Where am I possibly going wrong?

[werticus]

i find interiors take forever to render too especially if you want to light them realistically.

18 hrs for that does sound like a lot but i have no idea what computer(s) you have

The settings look low to me.

[samuel_bubat]

I think at least one of your problems is the "medium" Irradiance Settings. I ran into similar problems, too.
It produces way to much samples where you don´t need them. Try the following settings.

min rate -5
max rate -1

dist. treshold. 0,3

This should make lower render times but much smoother result.
If you loose detail, tweak the tresholds.

also render the scene with "show samples" on. and play with the different tresholds.
Adjust the treshold so you don´t have unnecessary samples in areas where not much is happening (plain wall for example).
As more samples you have, as more subdiv´s you´ll need to make them clean.
also play with the min rate. don´t fear to set them even lower.. to -6 or even more.

Now this is just for the GI part. Other factors like glossines of course can have a major impact on rendertimes, too.

[paulison]

Thanks again to all contributed thus far.

I am working through these options.

Paulison, do you ever work with files coming from MicroStation? (thats the program I use for all my arch design/modelling) I am sure that some of my issues are related to this workflow, but also feel that with the right steps they can me brought down to the bear mim.

Yes the speed of ies lights almost seem to be determined by each individual ies data file...as if some as setup in away which makes them more efficient.

I keep missing it, where do I find the reset button for the VRay settings.

Thanks

Hey WWX i import a lot from archicad and i'm not having so many geometry errors now from archicad 10, but previously i occasionally had some issues. Sometimes converting all geometry to poly would help me by welding some points and cleaning things up a bit.

I think that as someone else pointed out, it could be the light sources. They may be too bright which slows the rendering down a lot but also if they are bright and close to or intersecting geometry i think (could be wrong) that you may get strange things happening. So i think you could start by setting up a white scene just with a couple of lights and see if you get the weird blotching. I dont think that i've seen a lightcache look like your screenshot before but obviously something is off. as someone else said, its more likely to be lights or geometry than general settings but if you want to reset to default vray settings there are a couple of ways (or more):

copy and paste everything into a new scene - this may be worth trying either way. Or, load a preset... go to render and down the bottom to the left of render is a list of presets - there should be a default one in there. If there isnt a default one, start a new scene and save a preset using the vray defaults. its pretty handy as a staring point for new jobs to set up your own list of presets.