ok... let me find one of the Despona meshes I've converted where the "explosion" problem wasn't solved just by reseting the XForm. I'm pretty sure it was a "referenced scaling", but how I did it escapes me. My version of the 2cvb converted to 3ds with no problems. Seems like it was a Hierachy linking causing the problems. The key to all this is removing all the "Max" only features used in creating the mesh that have no counterpart in a 3ds file.