Wow uhm, I have to be honest and say I have no idea. I've never bothered animating shaders yet: if I do any realtime animation it would be through the UV's. It's probably easiest to just create a preset from your material, clear it/create a new one and then reload the presets.
Thing is you really shouldn't need the renderer anymore? There are good scripts that capture high-res anti aliased images without much hassle. It's been years since I've used Mental Ray or Vray for displaying any game art. On top of that, portfolio-wise I actually think displaying finished pieces with a shader/realtime app…
Hmm dunno about 2012, I use it at home and at work. No problems once I got admin access to the Max directory. Same for a few other colleagues here. It does "go black" when you have an object with a projection modifier and shaded cage on it using the shader, but that's all I can think of (fixed by temporarily switching off…