20 years later :p I have a hard time believing there's no way to do this in modern Maya? Keep in mind this was written for Maya 4 or 5 so good chance it will not work without modification and I couldn't be of assistance - I don't even keep Maya around these days - but without further ado:
May I please quickly refer you to the 2 little buttons ( << and >> ) at the bottom of the Channel Box/Layer Editor when it's docked on the right hand side. Worst idea ever. Seriously horrible. Pior put together an awesome JPG of the Maya UI inconsistency recently, too. Some panels have a "Save" button (which also closes…
Hey C86G! Color ID maps are *.PNGs to the SUITE - make sure you load in *.PNG maps and you'll have no issues going forward. If you use a different format, the SUITE auto-converts to *.PNG. I suspect in this case what happens is that it already detects the *.PNG if another format had the same name, and just proceeds to load…