I dont doubt you. However you should be a bit careful. Youd be surprised how literal minded poeple are. Typical OLD joke on irc is to tell people to pres alt+f4 when they have a problem and it works 33% of the time. This forum is not elusively read by people who understand the finer point of computing. Hell even multimillion dollar companies have problems to understand how to do backup on mission critical stuff.
Anyway i do vote for the AAAA BBBB's comment. This is the most likely culprit, or atlest the one om top of the checklist. Because this is the default behaviour for 32 bit mentalray when it need to map more memory then available. And this is very often the reason. But yes deleting prefs might work, but id say its a long shot. It may even turn out this si exactly hwat the default prefs do!
old scripts were causing problems because of changes in mel syntax and python.
You mean you understand backups but not conformance testing? Ok so its slightly more sophisticated. Usually it takea s week or so doing conformance testing in the background manually to get up to speed.
Actually theres not much SYNTAX change, there is however quite a lot of factory procedure change, which is why good scripters know to avoid those calls. But yes sometimes they are kindf unavoidable for any sane speed. of things.