i see. but that's strange indeed. the objects in question are constructed via 3d Max's primitives and nothing has been set for transparency. maybe 3ds exporter's behaviour changed over time.
There's a setting in Config for using the old importer. Have you tried that one, and could that help?
Didn't we had a similar issue with some sky dome in Karga after implementing that feature in the loader? Everything went darker, because the dome now had a transparency set?