Keyshot freezing mid render.. help!

[mmmster3d]

this just started happening last night- crunch time for the engine rendering competition looks like i may not be able to make the deadline now!!

3 times in a row this scene has frozen at 43%.  it goes through as a small jpeg just fine, but not at 4000px on the long side as a 32 bit tiff.  i rendered it just fine at 5000 as a 32 bit tiff just the other day though.  what gives?

i read here someone had an automatic up date on their video card which made keyshot freeze for them and rolling it back fixed it, so i pulled out the installation cd for mine and reinstalled the original driver but again, 43%...

opened an earlier file of the model i was working with, thinking maybe it was the materials i had applied, tried it at 4000px 32 bit and it got to 51%.  hmm.

what could be the culprit?

I've taken ray bounces down to 10.. tried different hdrs (just got hdrlight studio, thought maybe it was the problem but i tried the startup hdr too). 

im running windows 7, i72600k, 16gb of ram.  never experienced this problem on even more complicated models with higher render settings. 

[mmmster3d]

could windows have updated something else and messed something up?  how would I know? 

[Dylan]

Grasping at straws here, but have you tried reloading the updated driver and trying again? Also, have you tried rendering a different scene in KS to see if that works? Or maybe the same scene at a lower res? Try it at 3000px and if it works you can resample it up in Photoshop. It might get you out of a bind in time for your competition.