I'll start where I can, because it's confusing for me to even think about, though that doesn't mean it's confusing, just means I'm stupid. =P
Anyway, my friend has a really hard time modelling in 3ds max, so he models everything, everything in Google Sketchup Pro instead. Pro has an exporter that changes it into .3ds, which Max can use. Anyway, we imported it and found a whole TON of errors, but for the weapons we could just ignore them, so we did. Once we got to the vehicles and maps, it was a whole 'nother story. Most of them we could fix on the vehicle, but the map had thousands of 'em, but we've almost got them all...but heres the thing. My friend got the errors literally down to about 75, and he's working on the last of them now, but we have different versions of max, he 2009 and I just 9. So, I figure, hey, shouldn't they be compatible?
Nope.
So I can't open his max files. No biggie, right? He can just export them and send me the 3ds so I can import it.
Now heres the thing, we started with like 2300 errors, and he got it down to 73. He sent me the 73 errors version, so I could take a look, and I imported it and checked it for errors using edit poly, border. I even used the STL check to be sure. It was up around 3700 errors in my version, for some reason.
He still has the 73 version, and he's really quite proud of it. However, I'm not sure if he's got a full grasp of tool yet, and I don't like explaining things to him because he doesn't catch on THAT quick. I'm just wondering if anybody knew how I could either get a converter for our max files, or make the 3ds files more accurate.
Help?

it's a nasty problem with version differences, old plugins can't work on new max versions, we have to cope with that as far as i know...
You could just get a trial of 2009 to get the job done, makes it easier for as long as the trial lasts, 3 months i think

Isn't it 1 month? And using STL check doesn't always work. Neither does border. Run it through tool to check.

Yea, and then use the .wrl, I learned that just last night...
And, even worse for me, the trial is apparently expired. I don't remember when I used it, but apparently I did.

For my next map I'm thinking of just using max 8 because there's a version of Blitzkrieg that works with it and it's FAST! I mean , bluestreak can take 10 min, Blitzkrieg takes half a second. Makes fixing errors much faster.

But anyway, just get the trial of max 9. It lasts 1 month which should be enough time to fix errors and export.

You could also try exporting as an obj file and importing that. It might not have the errors, but it might rescale things or have problems with materials. i don't know.

Blitzkrieg doesn't work for vista.

I have the full version of Max 9. 2009 is not backwards compatible to 9, however, and my trial of 2009 is used up.

I'll try that. We'll see.

Blitzkrieg works for Vista. It doesn't work for Max 9.

Ooh.
Okay. Sorry.