Arran - the occlusion render is looking much better now man. I'm sure you can see it's still a teeny bit grainy on the floor, but I'm sure thats just because you didn't wanna double up the samples again and wait longer.

As for the distance value... that's odd. A max distance of 0 should equal inifity so by entering any other value, technically you should get less joy rather than fixing it. When it renders black after applying the surface shader, it's usually because you've not rendered in MR. You sure you had it on at the start? I say this because if you've tried the way tweety said, it sets up the same stuff with default values right? And that would mean the distance back to 0, samples back to 16. I reckon you'd find if you went back and tried again it would work with 0 for distance. If not, it must be another bug. :/

By the way this is the winner for me at the moment, really looking better every time i look. I really like the detail on the stick, and there's quite a few nice touches in other places too. Competition is heating up though, keep going dude. Whats next?