General Animation Questions/ request for help

I'm using 3dsmax 6 with the 3dsmax 6 exporter reccomended by the Torque for Artists section.

I'm using a standard biped with 3 spinal segments, 2 finger parts with 3 digits each, 1 toe with 1 digit, a tail, and everything other than that is just fairly common stuff.

When i create a regular animation to use for the root anim and export, I just get a crash when I load the shape in shape viewer. It works with the default root animation. No data appears in the console log that helps explain the crash.

I'm wondering how to go about creating pretty much all of my animation. What rules are there in order for root anims to work in export, how should I build animation off of my root animation, whether I should link the bounds to biped01 as with the Orc character or to the pelvis, just general stuff like that. Iv'e been setting collapse transforms to off for export of the character itself and setting it on for animation, and I'm wondering whether I should do that. In other words, I'm wondering what I should generally do with all of my animation.

I believe that the Orc character uses some scaling in certain animations such as sitting and falling because it distorts differently sized models using similar bipeds to a large degree. I'm wondering if my assumption is correct on that thought.

Are there any particular settings in the export tool that need to be set before exporting root animations? If so, that would explain a great deal to me.

Does the bounding box absolutely need to envelop the entire character at all times, just the bones at all times, or is there no specific need on that?

This is related to my topic in getting started to a degree, but since I wasn't getting any exposure to other 3dsmax users I decided that it would be best to post it here.