> There is a much better solution.
...
> The scene does not need the *emission* of the *visible* sphere as a
> light source.

As I said before, there isn't any need to try this for radiosity, it 
will just cause problems like you experienced. It's only in the code as 
it is needed for mcpov (where is works fine).

> It only needs the light source itself. So, the solution is
> to put the sunlight at the standard SunPos position, and the *visible*
> sphere and its radius at sp/1000.

I don't know if there are any accuracy issues related to having a 
light_source a very large distance away, I expect it may cause some 
shadow artifacts? The length of the vector from SunPos is quite 
arbitrary, so in every scene you just need to find the max distance it 
works at, then I'd probably divide by 10 or 100 just to be sure you're 
not near the accuracy limit.

> In addition, just make emission of the
> sphere equal to 1.

The problem with that is the sun will look unrealistically dim compared 
to the sky when visible in any reflections, especially darker low-level 
reflections (eg a black car). You could set emission to 0 and ambient to 
the original physically correct 1.6e9 * EXP, but I think that would 
still influence the radiosity algorithm and give you back the bright 
splotches again.

At this point I usually fire up mcpov :-)

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