Alright, if I got it right then any adjustments made to the first keyframe will apply for the entire animation. That explains why I managed to get funny shader animations, I kept flipping between keyframes while I was editing the shaders.

I also tried to create a smoke trail like in one of your tutorials with the particle emitter. That's when I really messed up. I didn't use a path like in your tutorial so I moved the emitter around the scene between my six keyframes instead. I ended up trying different values for the emitter in all keyframes by mistake (it would also be fair to say by ignorance). I couldn't for my life understand the erratic behaviour of my particle emitter until I read that Carrara animates just about any changes to a keyframe.