Great tip Mind-raper!
Another tip along those lines, would be to paint like 10 or so ""pixie-dust" images at around 128x128 in size, then use them as instanced sprites from an omni emitter with a little bit of glow (possibly even with a noise expression on the glow intensity) and attach that to your path or object
For a "pixie-rain-dust" style effect, you could do the above, only combine the idea with our SM rain tutorial.
Great tips all!
Israel "Izzy" Long
Motion and Title Design for Broadcast-Film-DS
izzylong.com