Welp, unfortunately, I've hit a hickup with this little project. Hopefully nothing fatal, but it is annoying, I'll tell you that much. The Smoke Trail rig that I made crashes max everytime I open the original scene, but NOT when i merge it into a new scene. I can't find anything resembling a Log file that max keeps, so I'm uninstalling and reinstalling max 9. Unfortunately, with all the plugins I have this process can take about 2 hours >.< - if that fails, I'm going to have to remake the smoke trail rig (not a big deal, but what a pain).