A Vile Pestilence

For weeks now Will has been working hard to build and rig a base male player character model. Last week he finished it. He tried using the DTS exporter but for some reason the models failed to export correctly. Not wanting Will to get bogged down with exporter problems I told him to move onto other tasks and I would sort out the export problems.
Unfortunately my attempts at exporting the model encountered the same problems. Upon hearing of my troubles Alan decided to test the exporter in 2009. He found that the same problem occurred. Since he couldn't remember having such problems when using 3D Studio Max 9 (rather than 3D Studio Max 2009) he reinstalled Max 9 and tried it out. Using the exporter in Max 9 worked so Alan arranged for Max 9 to be reinstalled on another machine in A104 so I could use it.
Unfortunately another problem reared it's head when I found that Max 9 cannot open files made in Max 2009, further complicated by the fact that Max 2009 does not allow a file to be saved in a legacy format. Even worse none of the export formats exported the links between the skin and the bones.
Despairingly I turned to the Internet in hopes of finding a plugin or script that would let me export from Max 2009 and import Max 9. I searched diligently but there were remarkably few import/export plugins/scripts that work with Max 2009 and none worked as wanted.
I have several other ideas to try before I resort to getting Will to re-rig the model in Max 9.

****** UPDATE ******
Thanks to Tim being awesome and putting me in contact with a super cool person from Interzone, I was able to get the mesh and the skin data into Max 9. Best of all in Max 9 I have been able to export the model correctly so that it works in Show Tool Pro, proving that the irrefutably proving that the export problem in Max 2009 was due to a fault in the exporter.

Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to get the biped into Max 9, so I had to create a new biped. This is not an ideal solution as the new biped is not exactly the same as the old one meaning the weightings for vertexes in the skin data is not perfectly accurate. I'm going to have another attempt at making the new biped, this time I intend to try to copy the values for each bone exactly (a time consuming task).