Building PBRT
I built pbrt in Visual Studio 2005, which worked pretty well. I got stuck because my installation of cygwin didn't include bison and flex, but the error messages didn't really show that, so I thought it all had to do with the common problems specified on the pbrt info page. I also had to use full paths instead of relative paths.
Rendering
I rendered at 150*150 resolution with only 2 samples rays/pixel and 2 samples per area light source. It never bothered me to wait 10 seconds for the images, so I didn't expreminet further.
Experimentation
No fancy other images. I just played around with the transformations to familiarize myself with the scene setup and coordinate systems.