I'm not sure if you would consider any ot these the long way round / easy way to do it! but I would tend to do the first option.

Opt 1:
Create a cylinder,
Select every 2nd face
press e to extrude, but don't extrude to any great distance,
press s to scale and scale out the gear teeth - the teeth ends will now be way too big
switch to a side view press s to scale followed by x y or z to limit the scale along the axis of the cylinder and scale the width of the teeth down
tweak the rest of the scaling on the teeth end to give a gear.

Opt 2:
Create a nurbs curve in the cross section shape of the gear wheel
extrude
convert to mesh

(not sure if the steps are exact for opt 2 haven't played with nurbs / splines much in blender yet - but it'd work fine in Max...)

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Toolset: Blender, GIMP, Indigo Render, LuxRender, TopMod, Knotplot, Ivy Gen, Plant Studio.