Yay....that worked.

In the Max texture path I had the texture name without the .tga extension. This resulted in teh texture not found problem. Fixed that and all was well.

Sadly, it has proved less useful than I hoped...since I don;t seem to be able to add new versions of the 'wardog' without getting errors. I can replace it, but not add anything new to the animals section. I tried with the same class but a new modelname and ID...but it gives errors. Need to look at this in more detail