yea and that's what i did right before i was going to re-install. giving it more patience then ever, even though it still said "rendering with maya software" and nothing else in the script editor i noticed that i was getting some frames on the output file the frames were saved. so i tried it for the scene i was doing and yea its working but its unbelievable how slow it is. im getting about one targa frame every 10-20 minutes! now i dont know if thats the normal speed for rendering frames but im at least glad that i can work more on my movies. i know star wars took a couple hours to render some of their frames but i just have some stupid guy walking around on a rooftop.