This doesn't directly answer your question but there is a button on the toolbar that toggles the preference. That might be the route of your problem.

My experience with this is YES.

Do you have environmental lighting enabled in your renderworks background?

Yes but not in a viewport. I have had instrument symbols ghosting inside other instrument symbols when editing. Reopening the drawing always sorts it out. Annoying but not disastrous!! The viewport issue is new to me though.

Have you tried changing to a different workspace?

There was an earlier post about this and @Pat Stanford wrote a couple of short scripts that work well. I have changed the TRUE value to FALSE and it now hides all the objects that are not selected. I have made these into menu commands and added them to my object context menu and the SHOW ALL command to my document context menu. Works really well although you get some slightly weird behaviour within groups and symbols. Very useful though.

Alan, are you referring to animation using the Animation Works plug-in or is this all available with stand alone VectorWorks?

Click the little pull down arrow on the left of the search field. All will be revealed!

Receive shadows is correct. Turn it on and it should stop beams going through solid objects. You will need to re render to see the effect although it looks to me from the photo that there is no light coming from the fixture which points to a further problem. Are you using a symbol that has shipped with VW Spotlight? Post the file if you like and I could take a look.

Make sure that you have "receive shadows" turned on in your Renderworks background

Some very rudimentary movement of items has been achieved using Marrionette nodes and @Alan Woodwell is probably the guy to ask about that. There is a video he made below. Vectorworks is primarily designed as a 2D/3D drafting and render programme and at this it excels. If you want to create scenic animations then you can export VW models to other software like Cinema4D which can handle this type of work. Good luck. It would be interesting to know what you discover. Of course if you just want static presentation slides or the ability to model positions of scenery, then VW will handle this with ease and setting up different scenes and positions of objects is easy using classes and saved views with any moving scenery pieces as separate symbols.

Does the "Select Coincidence" function not answer this need or do you mean something else?

The greyed out rectangle is the size of the paper you are printing to. Go to File, Page Setup and uncheck page breaks. This is also where you can change the size of the paper you are printing on to. Once you have the correct paper size I find it is more useful to keep the paper size visible. With regard to your viewports, then it looks like you need to look at the design layer scale of the source objects or the scale of the viewports on the sheet layer. You should be able to adjust the scale of the viewport from the object info palette. Now you know what the grey rectangle represents, it might help you with making decisions about what scale you should be printing at.

Rotate Tool - Alignment Mode I understand the principle behind this mode but at the moment can't really think of a real world use for it. The help section is vague and the video tip is very brief. Could the forum help me with a bit more of an explanation of this mode and more usefully give me a really good real world application. Many thanks

Does the "fix profile" option not do what you need?