I have just started having a problem today when rendering a scene that is somewhat complicated. It gets maybe half done (random spots) then my computer freezes. One of my monitors goes black, the mouse won't work, and my only option is to shut down with the power button. I've rendered scenes more complicated before. These are anywhere from 200 - 300 frames, rendering Full Frames uncompressed avi.When I restart, the message I get is "your system has recovered from a serious error". Plus, one time it said that messages from my ati accelerator were being misread or something, so it had to reset itself.
My computer is a P4, 3.4 MHz with 2 gig of ram and my video card is a 256 MB Sapphire x700 pro.
The only "different" thing I have done this time is I am using a "glow" effect. I have used the glow before though, but the scene was smaller.