Has anyone got mental ray satellite for maya version 7 working?

I installed this to improve my render times and speed things up but all it has done is cause me to lose an entire week of productivity!

It constantly hangs permanantly mid render. The only way to recover control is to ctlr-alt-delete and forcibly stop maya.

I cannot even render a single nurbs plane!

I have two windows xp pro machines on my local network.

I have maya 7.0 (I do not want to upgrade to 7.0.1 until I resolve how to do dxf exports and imports).

I just downloaded the latest mental ray satellite for maya 7 (8.6m) and installed on both machines.

I created the maya.rayhosts files on both machines because I do not always model on the same system. According to the documentation for mental ray this is okay.

The latest version of mrs registers slaves on port 7104 not 7103.

I tested the connection by turning on progress messages and render a plane from a distance and verified that the slave machine is identified and the render completes.

I then soom in on the plane and render again and the friggin render almost immediately hangs! I can see from the mental ray status window that there are threads running on both the master and the slave system, but at some point everything just permanantly hangs.

I get the same behavior regardless of which machine I try to render from.

If I go to render current options and uncheck render on this machine then the render runs completely on the slave machine and completes! What is up with that?

The only way I can use this goofy ass feature is to not render on my master machine forcing the entire render to a single machine across a network easily increasing my per frame render times by 1000%! This is worthly!