As you know, 3dsMax searches a few folder to find your asset or map files. I personally do not set any of these search folder. Either having assets in a correct folder or not. But, I know some users rely on this behaviors and even having 100s(!) of search folders.
When you save a max file, 3dsMax will try to resolve all this path which means it will try to search all these folders until it finds the map. As you can imagine, it could take some time if you have a lot of maps and especially a lot of user folders.
3dsMax need to resolve path for 2 reasons. First, there is the asset meta data streams. Second, there is External Dependencies file list in Properties dialog.
You can turn off this process by adding this in 3dsMax.ini. The first one will disable resolving path for properties. Second one will disable for asset metadata stream. If you want to turn on set as “1”.
[Performance] SaveAuxFilesInFileProperties=0 SaveAssetResolvedFileName=0
Or you can run this code and restart max.
setIniSetting (getMAXIniFile()) "Performance" "SaveAuxFilesInFileProperties" "0" setIniSetting (getMAXIniFile()) "Performance" "SaveAssetResolvedFileName" "0"
Next! When 3dsMax open a max file, it will also try to revolve asset path to popup Missing External Files dialog. You can see it could take a while if you have a lot of maps with many broken or need-to-be-searched path on the network drive. Also 3dsMax will try to find every single file in IFL! One time I had a scene with many IFL sequences which total more than 20,000 images. You can imagine how painful was to load the file.
Good news! You can turn off this by setting this in 3dsMax.ini.
[Performance] FindMissingMapsOnSceneLoad=0
Or you can run this code and restart max.
setIniSetting (getMAXIniFile()) "Performance" "FindMissingMapsOnSceneLoad" "0"
I can not remember exactly. But, I think these options are added in 3dsMax 2015.
Try it!