Hello there
I just made a very eyopening discovery which i would like to share. I was having problems with my bionatics stuff. so bionatics sent me a patch that i had to apply into the max plugin folder. in order todo so i had to close max, which i did. BUT it was still running. Still running in the task manager. So ok i am just gonna kill it. NO WAY it just came popping back up within a second. It was driving me nuts. Until i finally came across the following thread. I hope it might help one or 2 people with the same problem.
Yep, the vrayspawner will open a copy of 3ds Max to process distributed rendering requests.
However, I have had orphaned unkillable processes on Win XP 64-bit which are not in any way related to V-Ray… only restarting helped to remove these (Task Manager > Kill Process would not work).