Sorry this is happening to you,
I am running 7.5 in my classroom and have been pulling my hair out over this. I was hoping that when I upgrade next year that this would have been solved. I have 18 IMacs and 12 G5s and this problem is on random machines. Here’s what works on some of them with this stubborn problem its Command Line Rendering. Before you do anything reset your preferences to default. Here is the path for that on a Mac. Select your home drive (the thing that looks like a house) / library / preferences / alias / Maya / 8.5 / and throw your prefs folder away. If you are using a one-button mouse remember that the next time you open Maya you need to select in Maya Preferences / One Button. Now set up your Render Preferences in Maya you may save and quit, rendering this way you don’t need to have Maya open. Next go to Applications / Alias / Maya 8.5 / Maya terminal.term. This is what I would type in for rendering frames 1 to 45.
Type: render –s 1 –e 45 (DRAG AND DROP YOUR FILE HERE) and press return make sure that you have a space after the last number of your end frame and your drag and dropped file, that should work. Let me know if it doesn’t.

Good luck.