Re: Why can't I control the light?

Turn off final gather. Then render the scene . If it still renders, then it
could be reason of your lights.
Rebuilding photon map will work when you are using light's mental ray features
like number of photons,  decays, photons energies etc. So my suggestion is turn
off lights, turn off default light in render global window, turn off FG main
option. Then render, It should render  black. Then you can say your scene is not
affected by any kinds of lights source. Then one by one switch on and see the
result.  Hope this will give you some starting cue in t