Thank for the responses.

Laurie priest, I tried altering the BSP but no luck (though I only tried the Large preset I have to admit). I haven't heard of the other suggestions you mentioned though will look into them for future reference - in the meantime though, I've managed to get renders by assigning MR subdivision approximation nodes to my objects rather than maya smooth nodes. I thought that would in fact be more memory intensive, but it works so I'm happy (any differences the alternate method makes to the object's is negligible).

Curtis - I've got 4 sticks of one gig (I did say I had 3 gigs, so couldn't have had 1g + 512mb) each. XP 32 bit only recognises 3 gigs without changing the boot.ini file, which I don't want to do. 3 gigs has always been plenty for anything I need anyway, will suffice until I upgrade to 64.

cheers folks

gubar