Quote - Acadia,

If raytracing is on then I'm really confused. However, there are occasionally problems with depth-mapped shadows and ray-traced effects. Try turning shadows off. Or - try enabling shadow reuse (caching) and do two renders in a row, where the second one reuses the shadow. If that doesn't work I have no idea.

I hope you get this worked out, as I'm not going to be able to help you much longer. I'm leaving for Hawaii in a couple hours. I'll be gone for a week.

If any of you reading this see people looking for me, please tell them I'm not ignoring them - I'm on vacation.

Oh have fun on your vacation!!!! 

No worries. I'll keep plodding along and if I don't have it sorted out by the time you leave I'll put it on the back burner until you return.  I don't need this for any particular project at the moment. I just want to learn how to do it.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi