Maya :: Echo Every Command Enabled In Script Viewer

We use Maya 2008 and 2009 here, along with Turtle 5.1. Our exporter plugin only works with 32-bit Maya, so we are a bit tied to that as well. We are using Turtle to perform shadow and AO bakes for our game, but Turtle fails unpredictably when baking large (>4096) textures. Many times I see:

// Error: Error during baking, see script editor for details! //

Of course, even with "Echo Every Command" enabled in the Script Viewer, and every output option enabled in Turtle, I get no actual error message. On a 16318x16314 bake, it completes 75% of the bake, then does nothing for the remaining 25% (while updating the progress bar) and exiting with the above message. On 8K bakes, it will seemingly finish the bake, but not write out the texture. Sometimes, Maya will crash completely, either with the usual error dialog, or just silently close without any message whatsoever.

In my experience, running out of memory on a 32-bit program can have similar results, and it is possible that 32-bit Maya even running on 64-bit Windows 7 has the same issues, but Task Manager shows only 1.5 GB used by the Maya process at the time of failure, far below the ~2 GB addressing limit for 32-bit programs.