I'm trying to import weapons into 3ds, but when i do it makes a mess of the mesh and i end up with triangles in the mesh which makes it impossible to work with. In addition the quadrify and optimizer modifiers don't do jack. Anyone have any pointers to help deal with this?

IIRC the NIf format requires triangles so even if the model is made using quads you'll need to triangulate the model when exporting - so anytime you import a NIF model it is always going to be in triangles.

do you know of a way to re-quadrify them temporarily in max so they are useable?