Perna has it many years ago (around 2009-ish? during his 3ds Clean era), it's called Automatrix, auto assign grey material and dark wireframe to any object created by default.
Hold down d to go into pivot editing mode (this is default you don't need to change anything). I never use insert. It's all the way on the other side of the keyboard. Useless button placement.
You said the AO comes out very weird, do you mind posting a pic? Check to see if you are baking to the right UV channel. (sometimes by default Max has it to channel 3)
I'm assuming you're referring to the eyedropper tool itself, not the brush-mode eyedropper shortcut. Actually yeah, for some reason the eyedropper tool samples to the background color by default, and holding alt samples to the foreground.
use unfold with default settings and rescale 0.1 and then press layout button. U need to be sure if you make your seams first. You also have an option of auto uvwrap in the uv menu.
I believe there's an option for "Select Thru" - sounds like you'd be better off assigning that as your main selection method (like on left mouse button or whatever) - I think it defaults to "Select Visible".
one of the guys at work uses a custom file menu dialog that replaces the windows standard one. must be a plugin. seems to work fine in max and ps and offers more customizeability than the default thing.
Yup - wordpress automatically creates a thumbnail and uses the thumbnail linked to the image by default. You can alter the size of the thumbnail in the WP editor, or in most off line editors such as Ecto or Windows Live Writer.
na cant be any harm to keep both types, but id lean more towards making the quicktime version the default. and the flash for lower bandwidth streaming via a link. But yea man ace stuff ;)
Yeah Daz, I went through tga, tiff (8 bit and 16 bit), bmp etc. I'll double check the lighting thing, but I'm pretty sure I tried it with nothing but the defaults in there.