Some meshes, exported in .3ds-format, appear completely taken apart, when I import them in several programs like Bryce or Poser. The position of single objects is not the same, as in the originally exported constellation. When I import them in 3dsmax, everything seems to be alright, but in any other program I get a "puzzle". I found out, that this is affected by the pivot-setting in 3dsmax, but I don't know, in what way...

I belive thats a problem with exporting them from Max. From what I know, its best to export them as Wavefront .OBJ and .MTL wth the Habeware free object exporter plugin. Ive had alot of meshes converted from max to 3ds and otten the same problem, but when export as obj, they seem to work just fine.

I don't have 3dMax, but I've played with some .max files. one thing I do is use 3dexploration to convert it to a dxf, then I take it into Metasequoia where you can increase or decrease the mesh number. A cheezy model can be made to look really first rate with a mesh increase. Then align faces, unify faces, and delete overlapped faces (three easy controls to use). Then export is as .cob and take that directly into Bryce. I haven't experienced your problem but this might be worth a try.

I too have had this problem where meshes are seperated and puzzle like. Sometimes if you ungroup the entire object and select (assuming you can make any sense of the objects structures) parts of the mesh, you may find that a simple 180 rotation might resolve the problem. it appears that parts of the meshes are rotated around central axis on occasion!