Over the last two years I have had reports about WW crashing Max under a couple different circumstances from various users. I can now say that I know what a bulk of those cases were, and actually the majority were not actually WW itself after all.
If Max crashes to desktop when exporting a model or group of models, here is a very likely culpret: MultiRes. The MultiRes modifier is a very useful modifier for making LODs and reducing poly count on models, and is one of the two default modifiers that are used by the WW auto LOD generator.
I discovered this week that MultiRes itself will crash if your model isn't really nice and clean. So if you have a crash when exporting models, bear this in mind:
Check your model for problems. The one specific case that I know that will cause a crash is if you apply a MultiRes modifier to a model that has isolated vertices. With 3ds Max 2011+ you can check this by selecting your model and using the xView for Isolated Vertices.
I don't have time to go over it more and cannot promise there aren't other ways to crash MultiRes. But this bug was confirmed by Kelly Michels (http://area.autodesk.com/forum/t70904) (Senior 3ds Max QE) and last night I got word from an Autodesk software engineer that the problems will be fixed in the next product update.