I was wondering if anyone else had come across this problem in Max 8. At the moment it doesn't seem to be happening to all characters, but to a fair few of them. They were all built and rigged and animated in Max 7. If I have saved a character with Figure Mode switched on, when I (or others) load it, it is still in figure…
It's a definite bug. The head programmer here at Gas Powered has sent in a bug report and wrote a small script for the artists to make sure that bipeds always get put into figure mode before saving.