That could be it - although is still doesn’t explain the OPs default scene. The size parameter of a point lamp seems to make no difference (at least - making it smaller doesn’t).
Either way - I reckon the easiest way for the OP to fix this is to do a clean install of 2.70. They’d get to play with all of the new goodies (volumetric materials etc) as well as having a slightly more user friendly interface (surely a good thing for a beginner).
To THEETX:
I don’t expect anything from you, so don’t comment if you aren’t helpful. Other people here are very nice, so why such a remark?
To those who have helped, I did go and change the lamp size to 23, and it rendered correctly. But the test file, as downloaded, had the lamp size at 1, and I wanted to render just as it was, so that’s what the first render was, with the small dot in the center. And I really didn’t bother to check lamp size, or any other settings that first time, since I didn’t want to change anything. After I changed it to 23, and ir rendered correctly, I saved the file as a .blend file, and when I started Blender and loaded the file, it was fine and kept the size 23 and rendered OK again. So I am assuming that the test file had a size 1 when I downloaded it. Thanks to all.
Nope - the lamp size in the test file is correctly set to 23. I downloaded it and rendered it (using Blender 2.70) without changing anything and it rendered fine.
Your instance of Blender must have changed something when the file was loaded (possibly due to the backwards compatibility issue between 2.70 and 2.69 as Bartek reported in post #36).
Anyway - now that you have got the file to render correctly - hopefully you’ll be able to start to adapt that lighting setup to your own scenes and get decent renders. It would be worth looking at the settings on the lamps, materials etc in that file and compare them to the settings you had in scene were the render didn’t meet your expectations - you may start to see where the problems stemmed from.
I’d still recommend upgrading to 2.7 though - the new features are worth it.
bill2reg:
regardless of lamp size, your concern was with lights not rendering correctly. Is that still the case? Please try a scene of your own and let us know if you’re done with the issue, and more importantly a happy blenderer!
I installed 2.70 (64 bit Windows 7) and now when I load the test scene, the lamp IS correctly sized at 23, and the render is fine. Thanks to all who helped. I appreciate your efforts greatly.