video here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Fct3B09QPY

have you checked the use 'colour texture as transparency' in the diffuse rollout.

I suppose you could have as many plugins as you want installed, but it only takes one cuase a problem.

Mine was with ies VE incase you happen to have that installed.

I had exactly the same issue, every time I opened sketchup it would crash almost instantly, worked fine without Vray though. Only way to find what the conflict was to take all of my plugins from the plugins folder and move them to somewhre else no my computer. Then move them back a block at a time,each time checking to see if it worked.

found the offensding tool, one that i no longer used or needed, deleted it, and havent had any problems since.

not ideal i know, but it did work

I agree with rsplerenburg....
you need to be able to give the gradient a size, in order to do that you need to make a diffuse layer in the material and set it to be totally transparent, put the gradient in this layer as well in the transparency of your main diffuse layer.

easier to show than explain, therefore material attached.

Archglass frosted.zip

This test below is a box 5mx2mx1m (sorry, I'm metric). Base wood texture image set at 1mx1m

it looks as though its all dependent on the scale of the base image used in the texgrid fill colour. If the base image is say 1mx1m (as defined in the sketchup material editor)then that is the size of one panel.

in this one I have adjusted the TexGrid repeat to 0.5, so each grid is 500mmx500mm

and in this one I set the base image size in the sketchup material editor to 2mx2m (UV repeat back to 1.0)

bump.
use the same tex grid sizes for repeat and line width, and set fill colour / line colour to black and white.

transparency.
in the diffuse - transpancy section use texgrid again. same settings as used elsewhere.

now that i've learned a little bit more about texgrid, i can see this being really quite useful!

just noticed as well that the texture size can be adjusted using the sketchup native material editor, however this will distort the base image and your grid lines wont be a uniform width, so probably not ideal!

Although i havent used text grid much i did get it to work.

I placed a bitmap into the Fill colour, and a Texacolour into the line colour. see atathced.

the size of the grid can be changed using the UV repeat channels. a couple of tests attahced, the first set at repeat 1, the second set at repeat 0.5.

could it be that the png is not being saved as interlaced?