ahh. I am in the same boat - seems like a pretty nice chunk of software, and I love the linking to model instead of importing deal. Materials and illumination are giving me a headache though.. anyone out there with tips, please chime in. Can I just use my old max material libraries? (I dont have them at work, so I havent tried that yet)

all of your old materials will work with the new mental ray renderer. That shouldn't be a problem. Most old lights will work with it as well. The first pain I came across was that viz4 key shortcuts won't work in the new one, so I had to redo that. I like the new version much better, if only I could figure out how to avoid the "no photons stored" error when I try to use final gather and caustics.

Print out the HELP.

It unfogged it a bit for me

you guys got any sample images you can show us?? would like to see how its workin. I am still getting scenes much too dark, though I will go and print the help and skim through there.... thanks

I already hit up the help pages. It did help on a lot of things, but the lighting still isn't going well. The help section tells what each thing does, but not really how to use it, or trouble shoot it. I set up a sample scene and got the new indirect systems to work on a simple model, but as soon as I try it on my building model, I get errors.
I don't have any sample images yet, but I will put some up when I do.