Simply Maya User Community - strage memory errors

OK, ready for this?

When I load up my scenes, I'm getting a memory error and cannot get the renders to finish. Our render farm has about 25 boxes. Half are dual P3 866 mHz machines with 1 GB ram, and 10 GB hard drives. The other half are dual 2.8 gHz machines with 2 GB ram and 80 GB hard drives.

Here is the odd part.

The older/ weaker boxes succeed in their renders (albeit slowly), while the newer/ beefier boxes fail with memory errors. As far as I can tell, they are all set up the same way. I've even watched the performance tab of the task manager and can see that there is nearly 1GB of free memory when the render fails.

All I can conclude is that either the error message is bogus and it's not a memory error or this is a bug in Maya 6 that could be fixed in 6.5 (which we don't have yet). I have a hard time believing that all of the ram chips on all of the new boxes are bad, but maybe.

Any thought?

Here is the error message for those of you that are curious.
==================GlobalAlloc: ==================
Bad file descriptor
Error: Free memory is low. Memory exception thrown
====================================
Cause of memory exception
====================================
2048.000 Mb Free Memory
2048.000 Mb Free Swap
3.333 Mb Size of alloc
10.000 Mb Low Memory Threshold
====================================
Memory use when exception was thrown
====================================
====================================
4 Page faults
873.711 Mb Peak total size(Estimated)
784.756 Mb Peak arena size
====================================
873.711 Mb Current
3.222 Mb Render Geometry Arena
746.672 Mb Render Cache
21.653 Mb Arrays
4.375 Mb MEL
4.002 Mb Pixel Map
6.055 Mb File Texture Mipmaps
0.028 Mb Ray Tracer
0.625 Mb Data Blocks
1.000 Mb NURBS AG
0.125 Mb Keys
0.125 Mb Transforms
0.125 Mb NURBS Surface Shapes
====================================
Error: An exception has occurred, rendering aborted.Error:
An exception has occurred, rendering aborted.
Frame triangle count: 9516