well im working in max 7, ive got some maya models I want to bring in, but when I import them they arent quads anymore, they are tri's. Now I can go ahead and select each diagonal and make it invisible with editable mesh, BUT THAT WILL TAKE FOREVER, escpecailly since these are environments.
Has anyone faced this problem? and maybe found a quick way to tackle this?

used the .obj file format on later max versions (3rd party import plugin) to preserve quads, not sure if those plugins were ported to the new version...

What file format are you using to transfer the file? Like Mr. Butcher said, .obj files should preserve the quads. I've gone from Max to Maya that way with no problems.

well going deeper, I found that these models were brought to maya from max, so that's where they got turned to tri's. now Im bringing them back to max as .obj's and they are all tri'd out.
any suggestions?

If there's no option in Maya to quad-ify, you could go this route in Max...
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=136040

Yep, I was going to mention the same script. It'll probably get you 90% of the way there, but you might have to do some manual cleanup after you use it.

Another option in Max is to make sure you have an EditableMesh, not EditablePoly, and use the Auto Edge funtion. Select all the edges and click on the Auto Edge button under Surface Properties. Experiment with different numbers to hide more or fewer edges.

Perhaps I'm using some archaic conversion method, using Deep Explorer, but my OBJs always wind up as triangles whichever direction I'm going in. That script sounds like it could be tres handy.

I also seem to get vertices randomly unwelding themselves, but thats generally not that big an issue.

Yeah, going through Deep Exploration is probably what's causing the triangulation.
As for the verts unwelding, are you using .3ds format anywhere in the process? 3DS format unwelds verts on UV seams since it only allows 1 UV vertex for every 1 "physical" vertex.
If you get those OBJ import/export scripts for Max, you won't need to use Deep Exploration at all and everything should be fine.

Get the obj2max and max2obj plugins here.