Hi all, been using this site quite a while but this is probably my first post.

And it's a cry for help!

I recently moved up to Carrara 7 from 6 and wanted to start taking advantage of network rendernodes.  The setup was supposed to be easy enough though I had to disable Windows' built-in firewall to get the broadcast sent out / picked up by the one node I had ready to go.  Seemed even specifying the exact ports (5020, 5040, and 5060) didn't help.

I had the main hub and the node talking as the node loaded the scene, calculated particles, calculated lights and shadows but then nothing happened.  The CPU usage on the node went from 25% to 0%, and the mem usage went from over a GB to just 150k.  The main hub continued to render but it was clear only the four local cores were doing any work on the video frames.

I tried different ports, but no good.  I tried both wireless and wired connections, no difference.  The only other thing I could think of which I cannot change is that the hub is Vista and the node is XP.

When I eventually stop the render, a message appears saying it could not communicate with the node on port 5060.

So I'm not sure what to do next.  If any of you Carrara masters can assist I'd appreciate it.  And I'm happy to share more info if anything is useful.

Ta guys, I'll share the action-packed video with you on this thread if you help me fix this. ;)

Matt