A few notes:
*Downloading windows PE is a violation of international copyright laws unless you're friends with Microsoft.
*Max won't likely run on linux, you can try with wine... but if it did, copying it onto a bunch of discs unless you have a site license would be... you guessed it, copyright infringement. (ah whoops... just backburner... haven't worked with it, didn't realize it was a seperate util... is that licensed as freely distributable or something?)
*No need for a special clustering distro, the network renderer should take care of the networking magic, full clusters are usually for other types of things, network rendering is much more simple.
*POV-ray is a full fledged tool and isn't just a small little utility, it's been used to render images by an astronaut while he was staying in the international space station.
*.max files are very hard to convert to/from due to the fact that the scene data is not stored in an open standard. I find it doubtful that you'll be able to use these directly. .3ds and .obj would be a better choice, but neither of these contain scene data either.
*any good open source tool (I prefer blender, see my little picture thingie...
www.blender.org) should be able to network render on a bootable disc.