Hi Michal!
I got another occurrence of the distance tex issue, I've to run another test on it but there seems to be an issue when rendering sequences. Max 2016, railclone 2.7 and vray 3.304. I've got a 221 frame shot of a docks. Railclone is being used to create the docks wall and there's a water plane which uses vray displacement and the phoenix tex to make a moving surface. I've mixed in the distance tex as a mask on the plane's material to blend between water and a white foam and what I found on a recent render on deadline is that the first frame a render node does works totally fine but after that, the distance tex no longer works, as if it's not seeing the mesh made by railclone. I put through another render but this time turned off use instancing engine and put a mesh select modifier on top of the stack and this time it worked fine.
Any ideas? might be worth putting through a sequence of your test to see if it behaves?