yea, I may have to mess with that... problem is 3dsout was discontinued in 2007, and they only recently added 3dsout to autocad 2008... actually they didnt, they offered up a "3dsout" .arx file for download that i found a link to from some autodesk employee on the NGs. either there was no help file, or I didnt DL it, I'll have to check, but either way, it's not in the actual help file.
I'm also having troubles... the recipient is using 3dsmax 9, and no matter what I do, the file is unopenable, says data is invalid or corrupt... ugh... it creates a 13kb file from over 2000 3d solid obects in the dwg file. Which seems ungodly small, but I'm unfamiliar with .3ds files so I dont know. I guess if it were simple point data for every surface vertex, it may condense a lot, but 13kb seems teeeeeny.