>  Actually my intention was not to ask "test with tons of objects put one 
> in
> front of the other, as many as you can, to see that it indeed works", but 
> to
> test that the feature didn't break any existing scenes (eg. by crashing 
> the
> program or causing visual artifacts). :)

Well, yes. It seems not to have any problems crashing.

It does seem to make some speckling of shadows in some
cases where scenes in 3.6 did not.  Specifically
in 3.6 at mid transmit values the group of spheres
would appear to have shadows that were darker
and unspeckled, but in beta 22 there were speckles
that looked like coincident surface behavior.

http://s201.photobucket.com/albums/aa280/Zakardis/?action=view&current=beta22_36.png
vrs
http://s201.photobucket.com/albums/aa280/Zakardis/?action=view&current=beta22_37.png

Performance was up to seven times slower than 3.6 default.
It was better than twice as fast as compared to 3.6 with
max_trace_level increased.  Most interesting to me, performance
wise, is that beta 22 default and beta 22 with max_trace_level
increased performed almost nearly identical to each other.
Maybe the default max_trace_level could be raised a bit
without impacting performance?

Misc. editor issues
-------------------
In WinXP with 3.7 (with render window | get focus on
creation checked),
the render window now only gets focus on creation of the
render window,  successive renders do not get focus,
this is a change in behavior from earlier versions...
perhaps this deserves an extra checkbox? get focus?

Also if render window | keep above main is checked
then if the render window is minimized, (or if the render
window was minimized before "keep above main" was
checked) then it is impossible to return focus to the render
window, it's forced under the main window, instead of over it.
You need to uncheck keep on top to get the render window
back.  In 3.6 if "keep above main" was checked then if
the render window was minimized it docked to the editor
window instead of to the windows taskbar (that way it
was still over the editor window).

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