Recently I keep having a problem in max where stuff seems to move as if it's snapping to grid points, but snapping is definitely off. I think the problem is that I'm working on a very large scene (as in a large area), with some things very far away from others. Has anyone else had this problem, and is there any way to fix it without resizing everything or something like that?

Running max 2009? The marquee selection is choppy as hell for me.

I hate 2009 and switched back to 2008.

sounds like the scene scale.
try linking everything to a single dummy and scaling the dummy way down. if you need the scene to be the original scale again just set the dummy transform back to 100(just remember to link any newly created objects to the dummy before you do that so they get scaled up)

thats how i deal with giant cad files anyway

Thanks, I'll try the dummy trick