Lights don't render

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I'm working on a scene. It's an interior render in a scene that I did at the beginning of the year. This setup shows deeper into the building, so I threw in a few lights way back in deep to light things up. They don't light anything up.

 

I tried sky portals. I turned the lights up. I turned all the other lights off. Exposure Control shows nothing, but the light levels in the viewport respond nicely to EV adjustments. I delete ALL of the lights, portals, sky, sun, free... all. It renders great with default lights. I put in one free photometric. Black all the way down to EV -6. Standard? No dice.

 

I deleted everything in the scene. Made one light and one plane. Black.

 

Somewhere in this file there is a "lights don't work" button.

 

Sweet, now I've got it to where not even the sun casts light.

 

Any clues what's wrong? Driving me nuts.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

The problem isn't pressing. I merged the geometry into a new file and created new lights. All is well.