Configurations and Photoworks

As a rule of thumb I ALWAYS do material adding and/or editing at the Part level. That said, I thought that I would be adventurous and try configuration with Photoworks. Needless to say it blows up big time once thrown into an Assembly in that when you render none of the materials are there. I even went back into the Part level and switched from "All" configurations to "Specify" configurations and it gave the same end result.
So I had an "AH Ha"moment and thought, that I had missed something thinking that maybe the work flow might be different for configurations so I went to the Assembly and added different materials to each of the features while I was editing each Part "So this should solve my problem, right?" Click render and a big fat "NO" from the program. ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!
This is huge!!! if this is a bug. I mean having to create 3 separate files just to add materials from Photoworks makes me feel like Charlie Brown running to kick the football while Lucy is holding it. Maybe one of you guys know a work around, but for now it seems not to work the way it should.

Maybe you just figured out the new SW logo. :P
CB kicking a football while L holds it.
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This is a bug and I believe it showed up in 2007. Configurations used to be a great way to show different materials but in their current state they are very frustrating.
The only workaround I know it to open the part file (every part file with a configuration), cycle through and render each configuration, CONTROL Q the assembly and then try rendering. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't.

Rob,
Can this be done throught the API? It may not work because sometimes subassemblies will "remember" configurations that no longer exist in parts or other subs.
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Possibly? I see no reason why you couldn't write a macro that would cycle through the configs and render them. I'm not sure it would solve the overall problem of the assembly remembering them.