Strange issue

I’m having a problem with explicit normals.
I’m bringing in mesh data (in the form of editable mesh) into a scene, that has explicit normals, but when I convert it to Polygons for changes, it seems to convert the normals into unspecified normals and therefore the model becomes faceted.

The problem being that I can’t just recreate these normals again.
It almost seems to me that the normals are explicit and unspecified when I bring them in. but according to Max documentation, explicit normals are always specified normals.

hope that makes sense.
I’m using 3dmax 2009 if that matters.

The problem really stems from applying show hardware map in viewport to view some of the realtime shaders in Max’s viewport. it seems to display these unspecified normals, making it impossible to tell what the final output will be.