oo cheers for ya reply, forgot to update this. i found out what the problem was... i was running an old maya 6.0 scene file with maya 6.0 preferences dumped into maya 7.0 (copied preferences file over) which was not a good idea cause some of the settings conflicted with others. everytime i ran texture editor it wouldnt load, same when i tried render view and which for some bizzare reason the title bar stated "render panel 1" apposed to render view...

i sorted it out by copying the models and scene objects from the old file to the windows clipboard and then pasted it in a fresh maya 7 window, worked fine since. not sure what the exact cause was.

i took your advice and re-created a script that would force those settings in the event i get that error again. Thank you for the tech support!