OK, we worked it out. For those of you who are new to rendering and happen to be reading this post I just wanted to add what the problem was because it's something that's good to keep in mind when you download other peoples models and light them.

When you open a new scene in Maya the render settings will be at default but when you open someone else's scene the render settings they have will carry over. In this case the model ctbram uploaded had final gather turned on, so when bullet added his three lights the scene rendered with fg and instead of taking a few seconds it had to calculate all the fg points which took about 40 seconds instead. So a good idea is always to check the render settings when you light someone else's scenes.

Also the reason for the extreme hotspot on top of the can was caused by a spot light with an intensity of 8 without decay which caused the overillumination, this is why I thought bullet was using some sort of strange HDR probe.