MR aborts on me sometimes even with 2gb of ram.

its not MR thats the problem, its maya that has the memory leak. if you turn on progress message, it will probably say MR has insufficient mem ;
just do a batch render from frame 1 - 1.
mayabatch.exe will [almost] never crash.
if u use maya 7 and up, it automatically batch renders command line style, so u can turn off maya, it will still render.