What is your secondary bounce engine an what are it’s settings?
Light Cache
It was at 2200, but I can drop it down to 800 without much loss.
Bleeding
I don’t think you are seeing much bleeding… it is just the color of the walls they selected. I’ll try the vray material override to see what happens.
How are you lighting your scene ?
Shadow
vraysun/sky/cam. I do have one vray light behind the camera.
Other than getting darker, does tuning off the vray light get any better contact shadow on the columns?
I meant the irr clr thresh, .4 is to low , I’d try .2 to .3
that’s what I was wondering, I’d switch that off too and see what happens.
Shadows
I turned that light off and it didn’t help the scene, but it looks like the irr clr thresh is the winner. It is also a time killer, but that is okay. I have never played with the irr clr thresh so I am glad I posted. I rarely get interior projects so I am excited about this.
For interior scenes I like to use the Universal settings:
I have to take down the noise to .002 to get a noiseless image (which takes a while to render) but the results are quite nice.
settings
I am trying it, but it is crawling.
just back to the the image taking 15 minutes. To avoid wasting time trying to figure out what the cause is i think that its better to just go with the slow high settings and have it take 1 hour to render. My prelim renders take 4-12 hours and much of it may be overkill but then it saves having to worry about issues such as lighting quality & shadows etc. anyway, just my personal preference
I’ve always been wary of altering the irr clr thresh; well, all of the options on the right side under the basic parameters for the Irr map. Hrmm.. I guess I’ll have to start playing with them on my next interior scene.
Shadows
Someone suggested doing an ambient occlusion, which I did, but my ceilings and walls are 100% black. My materials for my ceiling and walls might be the issue. I am using the same material, changing the diffused, for all my walls and ceilings.
I’ll investigate and report back.
Shadows
The odd part is the center part of the fireplace was the wall material then I changed it to a tile. The last post on the railings is using the same material as all the other railing members. What could be going on?
Your normals are most likely flipped.
normals
That was it. My normals were flipped. There should be a way to show an arrow pointing in the direction of your normals.
You can display the normal vectors for selected faces or vertices by enabling Show Normals on the Selection rollout of an editable mesh object or the Edit Mesh modifier.
Normals
I knew you were going to say you can 
, but I spoke to soon. It isn’t the normals causing the issue. The hunt is on.
Double faces
I had double faces going on! I have to stop working so late. You can usually tell when you have double faces in your render, but I didn’t see it until I did the ambient occlusion. Thanks for all the help. Hopefully someone else can learn from my idiotic antics.