Now that I've got that boat wake taken care of (Thanks again Mark!), the next logical project for me is to try and put condensation on a mirror (don't ask.)  Can it be done with a shader, particles, or the surface replicator... or something else I'm not very good at?

There is visible water drops and there is fog. For drops I'd use the surface replicator. For fog I'd use texture map To control reflection and modulate color. 

That's what I thought.  So, is the metaball the best way to create the initial water droplet?  I'm pretty familiar with the surface replicator, but the initial drop is my main concern.

There's lots of ways to do it.

If you're not very model friendly, probably the easiest thing to do is take a sphere primitive and apply the taper modifier to it.

-Kix

is there anyway of converting poser advanced shaders into carrara shaders?, I  only ask because there is a really good water on glass poserpro shader from bagginsbill. I used it in this image

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/contest/index.php?entry_id=33709

Sometimes direct conversions are not possible since Poser has some nodes that Carrara doesn't. However, from what I see, this looks to be pretty easy to reproduce in Carrara. 

This is a scene I use to test glass and reflectivity.

For this render on the window, I mixed two different Index of Refraction values. The first one was 'None' and the second one was 'Water'.  They were blended with a texture map I made super fast because I had Photoshop open. However, a little tweaking with the limits in a Noise shader will yield the same results. 

Mark

that looks really good mark

Wow!  That looks like just the ticket.  I'll start playing around and see what I can do.