I use Maya but just quickly tried a max file (2009 with latest opencollada).
One difference between PV and Away is away uses normals whereas PV ignored them (I think) First attempt failed! Make sure the .dae extension is lowercase, prefab doesn't seem to load .DAE ;) Also it ignores materials that are bieing requested from a path with spaces eg"My Documents" Single material per mesh only. For BSP make sure you model to a grid.
