storage and mental ray
 

gotta problem with mental ray and (i suppose)windows virtual memory
The frist time i hit render it goes smoothly...
The second time i hit render it just freezes maya and in the output i get a series of messages:
"unable to start thread XX: not enough storage space"
(like 6 of them)
If i just kill maya start it again and hit render its the same frist render ok second no way (havnt tested batch render yet since i got this problem)

I have 512mb ram and like some 30Gb free disk space.
Ive tried letting windows manage the virtual memory. And tested manual with 256, 512, 1024, 1536, 2048 and 4096Mb and still the same...

The problem started recently, like a week or so, it doesnt matters if the scene is simple or complex(it just hangs the second time on both), and no subd involved in the scenes...

I dunno, I get the same message sometimes, but it still renders.

dunno if it outputted error messages before... i do know it now freezes for whatever time you let him until you kill it...

Ok. Considering Maya suggests a minimum of 512MB of RAM just to open and use some of the stuff, I would think that you are taxing your system using Mental Ray (a resource intensive ray tracing program) and that your system is basically choking to death. Boost your ram dood, and you shouldn't have any problems.