Hi Dave,
I think this is the culprit. I haven't done netrendering in a while (like, 3dsmax7.5 era), but here's what i was doing last time:
1. if your textures are located locally, they have to be in a shared folder and from my humble experience, you can't share the desktop. Textures are like x-refs (if you're like me, started with autocad), so you have to take the point of view of the slave machine: Can i see the textures of the job given? So if the job points to textures located on the desktop, it won't find it (unless you copied your textures into the slave's desktop, which is redundant work). I'm not a script guy myself, so i never messed with the ini file, but what i do with the job is that when i choose a texture i search for it through the network, even though it's located locally. i.e. the path starts: //davescomputer/...That way, it kinda assures me that the path can be found (on the network) and when you send it to the slave it points back to your local textures folder.
2. If your local max machine has plugins, i believe that these should be installed on the slave as well. This one, i'm not too sure though.
But one thing that bugged me all the time, and never really figured out is that why some pc's on the LAN start to disappear and reappear sporadically. Our LAN guy blamed it on XP, maybe it was a hub issue, but is irritating cos slaves disappear every now and then.
Hope your job turns out well. Update us on how you solved it too.