Another issue.

My mesh was smoothed before I exported it. At some point part of the mesh decided to unsmooth itself.

Has anyone had these issues with the exporter?

I had some issues like this too, solving it by selecting all triangles belonging to a certain texture (material ID) and clicking "unify" in the surface properties of the editable mesh. I'm not entirely sure what I was doing though and also tried some other stuff like the "clear all"/"auto smooth" button, but I wasn't relying on any smoothing anyway because of the round cartoonish shape I was working with.

Coll, thanks. I'll give it a try.

I noticed on a mesh it was the same smooth breaks as the UV seams (the textures cuts on the mesh)... don't know if that's that 100%.
(side note: Hi all, it's been a loooong time!)

Didn't have much luck with the unify command.

I ended up just selecting polys for sections that I wanted smoothed seperately (sharp edges) and apllied the same texture from a different texture slot. So when it exported it made that a seperate mesh.
Basically what 6th venom said.

Then I applied a smooth modifier and ramped it up to 180.

Still have a little issue left but it's not too noticable, might also be caused by my unfinished normal map.
I can live with it though. I only noticed when I slayed the bot and dragged him, it was right in my face.

http://www.violationentertainment.com/files/video/SHclobberMD5071128.wmv
Originally I had sharp seams along parts of the model where I had first attached things together in MilkShape exporting Quake 3 Arena. It always exported fine as ASE but when I tried MD5 all those old pieces became unsmoothed in-game even though I had applied smoothing. So somehow the smoothing information had been deeply hidden in the model all that time even though I smoothed it. It wasn't until I toyed around with surface properties that I could export a good MD5, so I'm certain the answer is there, for my case at least. The UV layout on this is the same from 2002, a horrible mess in different pieces, but no problem concerning that since it has a (crap but) proper normalmap.

Nice clown! Like how he smacks himself in the nose and laughs.

The md5 format doesn't hold any normalvectors for vertices, or an equivalent of "smoothgroups" for triangles. My 3dsmax exporter doesn't create unsmoothed edges on purpose, it tries to export a mesh as smooth as possible (which means with the smallest number of cloned vertices), but there are situations where a vertex has to be split before it goes into the md5. That's for example if it is on a UV-seam or material seam.

As an alternative, when you run into such problems you can always try Berserker's exporter. It behaves differently in some aspects and might produce different results in some situations.

Or work like this:
1-Create your low & high poly models.
2-Create your low poly custom UVW map.
3-Export it with der_ton md5exporter & reimport it into max.
(doing this first your model will have ' "cuts" on uvw edges)
4-then do your high to low(the imported one) models projection (create the normals+diffuse+specular)

Doing like this is the best way to be sure your normalmap take care of "cuts", and so the normalmap will correct this itself.