Re: drspawner.exe shuts down
I see, there’s quite a bunch of twist-and-tweaking going on
Extracting the rendermesh appears to be the magic bullet, right? 
Here’s my log book:
okay, I checked my scene with your polycount tools, it says:
Found 885 object(s) with 1420575 polygon(s)
Shouldn’t be too much of a problem with my setup. But it could be smaller… let’s see.
After hitting your extract rendermesh button, we’ve got
Found 950 object(s) with 1438630 polygon(s)
?
drspawner.exe still crashes at such an early stage (can’t be much more than five lines in cmd) that it’s impossible to read anything…
I’ve checked the Override materials item in the Global Switches menu and now it renders fast and fine.
Rhino4.exe @master uses 895.000K
drspawner @slave uses 441.000K
Now I can backtrack the last line in cmd where the previous crashes occurred:
Preparing camera sampler…
Now, what shall we do with the drunken sailor?
There’s way too many objects in the scene, I wouldn’t be able to fix all this anymore. I’ll go with the slow single machine rendering option for now and keep an eye on multiple textures in the future.
Are there any tweaks on the VfR Options catalogue to be looked at any closer?
btw: I’ve got all the texture files stored in the exact same location (path) on both computers. this because there’s a backup routine scheduled in the background.
:o gotcha!! 
There’s a material that seems to return an invalid colour (huge negative rgb values) - whatever this means, as soon as this material is removed from the scene, drspawner.exe does not crash any more.
Funny enough, I never create materials that produce such errors. How come it happened at all?
Okay, it’s kinda late around here - See ya 'round tomorrow!
Cheers,
matthias