I think this is the first time we've released a hot fix with the release. We're trying to be more responsive with releasing fixes to the community - so we can squash the bugs before you find them.

3ds Max/Design 2010 made a big push on fixing hundreds of legacy bugs and all the top CER reports (make sure you submit those!). Here is how the beta forum felt about the stability of the beta release (which is always worse than the final release):
- 11% hadn't experienced any crashes
- 72% were experienceing no more than 1-5 per week
- 5% were experiencing more than 5 per day
- 46% felt the stability was better than the prior release (92% felt it was as good or better)

So, we think we have a solid release as measured by our statistics. We just hope this is the case for all of you too. Since our beta means that in general, there are no other plug-ins involved, it is perhaps best case. Third-party plug-ins can definitely affect the results as can graphics hw and drivers. Perhaps the biggest cause of mystery crashes are the "out-of-memory" problems that occurs when you're working at your RAM limits. These are near impossible to resolve by us (moving to a 64b OS and the 64b 3ds Max makes a huge difference in these cases).

Official hotfix notice:
Customers activating Autodesk 3ds Max/Design 2010 software are encouraged to download a hotfix that has been created in order to experience optimum performance.

This hotfix addresses the following issues:
• Performance regression under certain conditions when using mental ray with Final Gather bounces
• Stability issues when using an instanced Cloth modifier
• Stability issues that occur during file load with instanced geometry and Hardware Shading enabled