After spending most of the day working with it, we won't be doing the Dreamgrid Smart Start after all.
After crashing repeatedly with three different versions of Firestorm, and finding with no Smart Start the crashes ended - as well as the very large and heavy regions we have not loading as they need to -- it's just not working for us. It's a great concept, however. With a pretty powerful dedicated 64 gig Server we should be okay.
I think this works well for some grids and not for others, depending on what has to be loaded in etc etc.
Many thanks to Mistress Delgado for all her advice and help trying this out! :)