I guess a bit of good news wouldn't go astray for a change
For the past week I've been hammering my PC at work with a "background" render of 614 tiles for a QTVR panorama. In that time the only things that have stopped the rendering have been system-related reboots (windows update at 3am one morning and a major power outage last Friday)
The only time the app itself caused the crash turned out to be RAM issues, i.e. they were identifiable as causes of crashes in the GUI as well. It kept working through all application crashes I had and didn't appear to cause any system instability even after several days of continuous running.
Many thanks for getting this working
For populations, re-populate every frame must be turned on or you just get a single object in the middle of the population. (I suspect you may also need to turn on auto-generate for fractal terrains?). Also tested with mapped network drives and network path names in filenames, all without glitch.