Problem exporting instanced geometry from maya8.5 to max9

Hi I am having a problem exporting a scene level from maya.85 to max. 
Here it is. Any Duplicate geometry in maya gets skipped on export and dosen't
get imported into max9. Now I could make all the geometry Unique in maya and
then export / import into max. My problem is that our game engine is instanced
based so I need the duplicates in maya to get converted into max instances. Also
my materials when brought into max get all confused and allocated in the wrong
areas of the models. Most of the time this problem is fixed by just reloading
the image in the material editor but it dosen't always work. 

Hope you can get the instancing issue sorted that the important one

Cheers 

Andoni