render slave problems

[alkis]

hi all
i was wondering if anyone could help with the following
one of my render slaves is having serious probs
i m attaching a screenshot
[img]ftp://80.176.192.46/images/screen1.jpg[/img]

specs
dual xeon 3.2 ht enabled
2 gigs ram/ switch enabled
winxp sp2
vray 1.46.15
the machine is setup identically as all the other slaves which are working fine
the scenes settings are irm + qmc default low settings
they are hundreds of high poly vray proxied trees and shrubs

the machine starts to render the animation fine and at some point backburner gives an error and the frame restarts. however max does not shut down properly but another one starts and you end up with 3 max framebuffers as shown above
if i shutdown the backburner server or suspend the job the max dialogs remain .
task manager does not shut the processes down no matter what and the only way to get rid of it is to manually reset the renderlsave
all the permissions and network settings have been checked, reinstalled vray and max , disabled firewalls etc,
dont know if its a backburner problem or vray not being able to exit light calculations.
any ideas would be greatly appreciated
regards
alkis

[vlado]

In order to see if this is a VRay problem, you can do the following:

On the slave, in the 3dsmax root folder, there is a file CrashHandler.ini that typically contains the following:

; Set DumpInServerMode to 1, if you want to create
; minidumps when using max in network server mode
[SendDmp]
DumpInServerMode=0
;SendDmp=1

Change the DumpInServerMode option to 1:

DumpInServerMode=1

If 3dsmax crashes during rendering on the slave machine, a dialog will come up asking to send the report to discreet etc, similar to the one that you get if you start 3dsmax with GUI. Right after you press the Send button, in the folder C:\Documents and Settings\XXXX User XXXX\Local Settings\Temp you should have these files: acminidump.dmp, acminidump_big.dmp

Zip the files and send them to vlado@chaosgroup.com; this will help me determine if the problem occurred in VRay or elsewhere.

Best regards,
Vlado