Cool necrobump! In modern Maya, you can also turn on Edge or Surface slide in the Transform Contstraints via the Modeling Toolkit, or by marking menu: holding w+lmb.
did you try to output to a different location? this happened to me once a while ago...i actually had two folders w/the same name in different locations.
gradient maps are excelent ways of coloring b/w painted forms, and a cool way of getting some crazy stylized colors. shadow-highlight is also cool. woot!
it took me about 5 minutes to realize it was supposed to be a W and an H in negative. :D LOL I thought it was just some squares and a triangle with two on top :D