I hope that I can explain this the right way.
I' testing Houdini and i saw what could be a bug. When try to scale an object (or better a selection of faces or selection of points) rotated in respect to the world axes the scale is performed always in world coordinates regardless the repositioning and aligning of the handles (with the Start orientation picking). The move and rotate seems to work as expected (just try with a cube, rotate it freely on the 3 axes and then try to scale a face along one of its edges…it simply doesn't work).
In relation to this I had to ask another thing. Why when performing a series of Edit Sop (or Transform) the orientation of the handle is always referred to world axes and not to the local axes of the selection? I think this should be the default and an option should be to change it to world axes.
I hope someone can answer this to me.
One last thing. On Windows XP the render in background seems not working, and the render manager doesn't show the current render task and the elapsed time.
Thanks.

Anyone can verify this?
The scale bug (i think it's a bug) and the orientation of the handles (always referred to world axes and not local to selection) when performing transforming operations is in my opinion a real problem for the polygonal modeling workflow of the program.
The rendering in background not working in Windows (in Linux works perfectly) is another very annoying problem.
Thanks to anyone that can give me an answer

Hey glauca, not sure what's up with the scaling, I noticed that too. Kinda makes non-uniform scaling useless unless your selection is lined up with the world axis. Anyone know if there's a way to change this? I also remember having the render in background problem on windows, but I'm using irix at the moment and it works fine on there, so I'm not sure what the status on that is.