Nah, now that it's all running properly it's not a problem at all...

Update:

*Changed the intensities of the lights
*Increased light radius from 0.3 to 7 (Mental Ray != Maya Software...)
*Got a new sky pic for the sky dome - I like this one a lot. Nice reflections on the marble and you can really see the Fresnel effect in this one.
perhaps I need to lower the intensity though.

- Even after installing Maya with sp1 I can't load a file onto the 'out color' of a surface shader without invoking a fatal error... sky dome is therefore a lambert.
does someone have a better idea for it?
Benny

EDIT:
I'll start another final and go to :zzz: soon...