I've been using this tool a lot lately and ran into a couple of problems. On a brand new laptop (Windows 7 with an Intel i5 chipset), it will run even with a very large raster as the input -- as long as I turn background processing off. That problem is less of a headache. On an older workstation (Windows XP, Intel Core 2, 3Ghz, 3.25 GB RAM) I get the "Failed to open raster dataset" error. ESRI support informed me that the size of the raster input is the culprit for that error. The only workaround I know of is to chop up the input rasters. In general I've found that if I chop up me raster inputs to a fize size of 50MB or less the tool will run on the workstation.
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