Very cool. Interesting use of colors and the only thing that I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around is how did you get the torus to bend like that? I've been trying to figure that out myself so any help/ ideas would be greatly appreciated.
glad you like it .. of course ...it is a sweeping spiral rather than a torus...you will find it in bryce 7 by clicking on the little arrow beside create..then in misc you hav a selection of such shapes you can play with...also some of the 'bend' is achieved by both distorting the size/shape of the spiral and by using fov and zoom which makes the reflections distort even more hope that helps...if you want more i'm always happy to send you the file
you've expressed your pain really well here!!!
sorry about the pain part!!!