[hdesbois]

Hem..mmissplaced post methink...
Anyway, all the suggestions you may have read about noise reduction do work... That being said, in some cases, it does take a considerable amount of time to get rid of the noise. If you would tell us what you are trying to render, I'm sure some people here can help you.
HD

[rivoli]

-How many are using the alpha (which allowed for bounce control)?

i don't know, but i don't think that many. almost every image i've seen posted here after the first beta was released is done with it. it's true, you no longer have bounce control (which was reeeally good and i hope to have back, even if i'm not that confident that it ever happens), but the alpha lacked other cool stuff such as viewer/real time preview, -hd option, better memory managment, mxi textures.

-How many have figured out how to make network rendering work?

cooperative is not that complicate to figure out, it's just that as it is at the moment it's not really useful cos it doesn't work that well (read almost constant crashing when merging mxis).

-How many are just plain nuts and can let their computer sit for a week crunching out one measly rendering?

have no clue, but rendering with maxwell often involves a massive amount of patience.

-How many people have are preferred beta testers for NL and are using the latest beta?

who knows? hope they are enough and good enough to give us an almost bug free 1.0.