Softimage Xsi: render .mi from maya through XSI

I am currently doing a job for a client that has a render farm. They have offered me the use of their farm and I would love to take advantage of it, but am having some initial problems. I am running Maya 5 and have already learned about exporting .mi files. In theory these should run on their farm, but after some initial testing we have come up with limited success. They are initiating the render through an xsi shell and we can see mental ray go through all of the phases (photon emission, fg, render, etc.) but in the end we get an image that is accurate to the resolution(400*200) and image format settings(.tif) in the render globals, but contains no information when I try to view it in photoshop. I realize this is a very specific problem, but would greatly appreciate any help in the matter.


Thanks

nordpie